


The Argent Coda

by BetweenTownleys



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Chewie's life debt, Dealing with Consequences, F/M, Gray Jedi Kylo Ren, Gray Jedi Rey (Star Wars), PTSD Ben Solo, Temple guardian Rey post Rise of Skywalker, The Unknown Regions, World Between Worlds, and Porgs, canon-compliant fix-it, founding of the gray jedi school, hi this is about reylo though wow, the hard long road to tangible redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-06
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:26:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22142518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BetweenTownleys/pseuds/BetweenTownleys
Summary: The force vibrates around Rey. Below her. Inside of her. She is still always looking for him, however foolish she knows it is. She hasn’t felt his presence since he had vanished on Exegol in her arms. Perhaps that is the cruelest thing of all, she thinks. That she hadn’t felt him pass. Not with peace and purpose, nor with any other feeling. No fanfare or reward at the end of his brutal path. He had simply... disappeared. Ceased, as if a word unspoken. Rey reaches further, strains harder, digs deeper. He had found her here once upon a time, hadn’t he? Over merciless light-years of the void of deep space, the Force had propelled his presence towards her like a meteorite, until they had met on just such a rainy day. So now, she reaches.[Post-Rise of Skywalker canon-compliant fix-it Bendemption]
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 36
Kudos: 64





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Every reylo on the planet can unite with hands held over the devastating events of Rise of Skywalker, so I have committed as a sweaty angry fan, like many others, to personally fixing this egregious wound. The Argent Coda is sort of a 4th wall metaphor, its intended translation and meaning being "the silver ending", ie, all of our collective wish for endgame reylo, in this personal specific instance THE GRAY JEDI SCHOOL I ALWAYS WANTED. I've given the argent coda a force mechanic here, and will seek to explore in a realistic way what it would actually look like if Ben inexplicably fell into the World Between Worlds and then got yanked out of it again. PTSD is real, yall, and it's probably not pretty to be psychically linked to somebody going through The Shit. This will have some chapters. I don't know how many. At least 3, but I get the feeling this will be the kind of deep dive that's gonna take some time. I'm not editing too aggressively, this is a spiritual purge. Yes, Ben and Rey will get sweaty at some point, and yes, there will be a HAPPY ENDING. In summary: fuck you Lucasfilm. The end. Commence fanfiction.

It rains hard enough that Rey thinks it must be a gift from the Force; or at the very least, it is a sort of consolation. On a craigy beach low on the shore of Ahch-To, Rey sits on the open gangplank of the Falcon, with her arms wrapped around her knees. She watches the water run in a steady stream off the lip of the ship and pool at her feet in the mud. The day beyond the rain out over the water is foggy and blue-gray, inconstant shifting clouds churning low to the surface. In many ways, it is very beautiful, this has never changed from the perspective of a desert rat, even if it is also distinctly sad. Where her ankles are wrapped in white linen, splatter has begun to seep through and chill her feet, but she finds this feeling somehow preferable to the one she’d have if she were to draw them back. Claustrophobia and resentment lie there, and Rey does not hate the rain. Far from it. It does what she can’t, when it pours and pours and pours. 

Behind her, Rey feels the metal of the Falcon vibrating even before she hears the _whurrr_ of a wheel. D-O zooms down the ramp to her back, and then the droid is peeking curiously into her lap. 

“ALONE.” D-O prompts, shifting back and forth, it’s cone pointed up in hope that _this time_ , Rey won’t send it away again. She can’t help but smile, but then she looks back out over the water, just the same. 

The droid goes still as it computes this situation, then swivels out toward the beach. “WET! INSIDE!” 

When Rey remains silent, the droid knocks into her knee a few curious times, tapping more insistently with the mouth of it’s cone. “INSIDE. INSIDE!” 

“Just a little longer.” Rey sighs, and D-O’s cone lowers in melancholy. For a moment, again the only sound is the hiss of rain, the murmur of the ocean, and the battering of raindrops on the hull of the ship. And then the droid zooms off, back up the gangplank and away. 

Waves crash out over the open water, and rush up the rocky shore only to retreat again in a bubbling hiss. Rey knows the sound of this ocean well enough that it is almost the same as the heartbeat in her breast. Before she had ever seen it, she had dreamed of it. The sound of this ocean. It wails and cries and hisses as it snaps rocky debris off the face of a nearby cliff. She wishes this simple sound would fill her up again, like it once did when she had been a child, alone on Jakku in the belly of an AT-AT as she waited for sleep to take her. Now, old habits return, because loneliness is a cold wall inside of her after everything that has happened. Her feelings are a flat surface, an empty mirror where her reflection used to stand. So she listens. And listens. _Whush, Whush, Whush._

THUNK THUNK THUNK! 

The bang on metal is loud enough that Rey jumps, then twists around to see Chewbacca. He is looming, huge and accusatory at the Falcon’s entrance, and he yells and gestures at her with an angry paw that jerks towards the interior of the ship like an overprotective nanny. Once again Rey feels her mouth twisting up at the corner. Perhaps she _has_ sat a little too long with these thoughts. At least, for now.

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


The sounds of the Millennium Falcon are familiar and comforting as an old coat, kinder than the rain outside by far, and Rey folds herself down at the table and lets it happen when Chewie sloshes a bowl of broth down in front of her. It is some variety of Bantha rump, which Rey understands is a dish for special occasions, but she has come to learn over these past months with the Wookie that Chewbacca is not exactly the galaxy’s finest cook. There is something like a translucent fruit on a vine of tendons which explodes in her mouth with the texture of thick snot. But the rest of it is hearty enough, and more important than anything, it is hot. And then of course there is the omnipresent fact that as a child, this would have been the kind of meal she would have considered fit for royalty. So Rey dips her spoon into the stew under Chewie’s watchful eye and she begins to eat in earnest. 

Eventually Chewbacca slumps down on the other side of the table with his own bowl, and like he has been doing intermittently since their arrival on Ahch-To a week ago, he begins to question her plans. Anyone else would have been quickly jettisoned from the ship, but because it is Chewie, Rey just takes his ribbing in stride. 

“How should _I_ know what Poe-?” Rey shakes her head when Chewie interjects, waving him off, “No, no! Well to be perfectly honest I didn’t really _think_ about it. He doesn’t _own_ me, does he?” She tries to look repentant but fails. Chewie councils caution and she nods some more, though she feels tired all the same. 

He won’t let her forget what she’s left behind, but right now Rey is tired of a great many things; primarily, she is tired of _sand_. Tattooine was hot, and depressingly quiet. But even after coming back from Luke's ancestral home, the Resistance presented another scorching dune of it's own for her to climb, in the form of it’s many needs. And as ashamed as she is to admit it, Rey has grown weary of her friends, too. Especially of Finn, whose eyes these days always overflow with worry when pointed in her direction. Rey is tired in her body, but further than that, she feels tired in her soul. She is depleted near to emptiness. “You’re right, Chewie, you’re _right_! I just.. I needed the time. To be alone.” 

Rey supposes she can’t blame Chewbacca for his concern. O _r anyone_ , for that matter-- first, concern for her theft of the Millennium Falcon, right out from underneath General Poe Dameron’s nose. And secondly, concern for the fact that she hadn’t left _any_ indication of her destination, much less a suggestion that she had been planning on leaving at all. Even as she had carefully constructed her own yellow lightsaber, nobody had even as much as suspected. 

These things were true, and Rey felt a grain of responsibility for them. But perhaps, she had not needed to leave in as quite _a Han Solo-like_ a fashion as she had; between guard shifts in the dead of night. Three days of drinking in celebration of the war’s end had a way of dulling everyone’s senses, and if Han had taught her anything, it was knowing when to go. When she felt the moment come, nothing had been able to stop her. But this had never meant her departures were kind. Rey historically had always abhorred goodbyes, but this one seemed somehow more despicable than all the rest, because she saw no foreseeable _‘so we meet again’_ at the other end of this parting. Not ever, and not with anyone. 

“ _No_ !” Rey argues Chewie’s last point in a voice pitched a bit too high, cracking her face in a revealing way. “The stew’s _wonderful_ , I promise. And I _don’t_ think you’ve done a rubbish job, I just can’t imagine why you would want to cook for me at all, after what I’ve done!”

Chewbacca had been furious when Rey had tried to offload _him too_ , only after she realized he had been asleep below deck of the Falcon the night she stole it. After reluctantly explaining her destination and situation to him, Chewie had put the kibosh on any notion of dropping him off on a Resistance-allied planet. He had his reasons for coming along. Arguing with a Wookie was foolish and dangerous, everybody knew it, but Rey had very privately been just a little grateful. 

“It’s not a fib!” she laughs as he scolds her more, comforted by Chewbacca’s candid conversation. She feels closer to Han when they are together. Closer, in perfect honesty, to _all_ of the Skywalkers. She takes another bite to prove her point. On the floor nearby, D-O intently watches them eating, then looks down and mimics them by pecking at a saucer-shaped engine part. Chewie pontificates, and Rey laughs again. 

“Did he? _Han?_ ” She grins fondly. “Han Solo, smuggler, war hero, resistance general and _master chef_? Well I suppose if you’re that well travelled you tend to pick up a thing or two. And it’s easier on the pockets I’d imagine!”

They sit in an amicable silence for a while, memories of Han sat on the table between them as palpable as their dinner. Rey’s smile slowly slides off her face as the quiet stretches out, until Chewie makes a low, mournful noise, and Rey goes totally still. She looks down, eyes stinging. 

Thankfully, this time no tears slip down her cheeks. She wonders in the comfortable humm of the Falcon why, for Han Solo, emotion comes up raw and ready to the surface in an instant. But for the _other half of herself,_ for her _missing reflection,_ all she can muster is rain, and rain, and more rain. A little sigh cuts past her teeth and she hangs her head. 

“Yeah,” she agrees, quietly. “I miss him too.” 

  
  


“EAT. EAT.” 

There is a clang as D-O rolls into Rey’s chair, and she startles, then looks down with a twinge of irritation. But the droid seems happier for the attention than anything, and so soon enough she reluctantly smiles again, and then she picks up her spoon and eats.

  
  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


When Rey goes to greet them on the first sunny day after the storm has passed, the Lanai village chase her backward out of the front gate, until she lands on her rump in the dust. She holds up her hands in supplication, half amused, half dreading the future in which she must repair these broken bonds with the furious keepers of the Jedi ruins. How many of their structures had she accidentally torn down? Surely, somehow, there must be a better way forward. 

“Please, I’ve come in peace! My training is complete, I won’t be a threat! I can _control_ myself now, I promise! I’ve come to _live_ here! To guard the temple like my master did!” Rey waves off the quickly congregating population of fish women, all yelling in a rubbery gargle in her general direction. They gather around her knees and jostle her in unhappy recognition, even as she yells over the din, “Master Luke is gone, but his legacy lives on in me!” 

Several of them are weeping and shaking their heads in disbelief, and she smiles sheepishly in an attempt to reassure. They do not appear to believe her. 

  
  


The day goes somewhat less poorly when Rey skids down the far side of the island to where the Thala-sirens had once sat to sun themselves when Luke had surveyed this domain. The rocks are empty now, but Rey crouches down to examine the earth and concludes that the sea sows must only be feeding on the tender grasses in the warmer shallows, just off the coast. They will return in time, and with them their milk and their company. 

Her exploration of the rest of Temple Island is an act of reverent solitude. She finds the island quiet. Quieter than she remembers, perhaps not in the way the wind howls or the Porgs chirrup, but more in the way she would hear it _inside_. The temple doesn’t sing anymore as it once did, and the Tree is gone when she climbs to investigate. All that remains of the holy place is only a gnarled stump. It isn’t sad, somehow. But it makes Rey’s mouth go tight and her brows draw together as she thinks on her master’s intentions. 

A wind has picked up and Rey throws a grey cowl over her shoulders as she hikes up the mountain staircase, then comes to the empty village where she had once tirelessly sat on a rock slab outside of Luke’s hut. For a moment she strains against the desire to turn and observe the pile of rubble she feels must still be left of _her_ _own_ hut; her heart stops as she listens to that old memory backwards in time, of rubble crunching, the sound of Luke ripping the foundation apart stone by stone in an explosive effort to halt the activity within. To _quell connection_ , _to eradicate empathy_. Her fingertips tingle. But instead she only turns around and enters the place Luke had once slept. 

Inside is just as Rey remembers. She is a little surprised by this, taken aback in her heart in a way she had not quite expected. Though Luke is dead, this is still very much the home of a living man. His blankets have been tidied by the temple caretakers, and they have laid fresh flowers nearby in a pitcher by the bed, but even the Lanai know better than to rearrange his personal belongings. There is a curved blade for harvesting grasses, and there is a glass for collecting milk, and there at a small table is a modest pile of stained parchment, with a long feather sat atop it with the quill sharpened to a fine point. The fact that Luke’s spirit has chosen to convene with Rey doesn’t make the hurt any less that he is gone in body. Rey _misses_ him. She misses him like she _misses_ Han, and she _misses_ Leia, with an ache she will never really understand. Even knowing her real parents now, none were there to hold her hand during the long nights alone in the desert, when she would scrape another tally mark on the wall and wonder if tomorrow was the day she would finally starve to death. It is a seemingly endless ache, especially after that unspeakable night on Exegol. 

“...Master Luke?” Rey tentatively breathes into the air, sliced by light through the cracked door. Dust motes float in the afternoon as she holds her hope in her throat. But her plea is only met with silence. 

  
  
  
  


✶

  
  
  
  


Rain comes again. Rey is pleased to find it comes fairly often during this season on Ahch-To, somewhere between warmer and colder. Chewbacca is less pleased; Porgs always find a way through the cracks and into the Falcon on rainy days, and he spends most of his time shoving them off of control panels and digging their impromptu nests out of delicate circuitry. D-O whizzes merrily around the deck as Chewie gathers the Porgs in a basket, then dumps them unceremoniously back out into the rain where they scatter in disgruntled shock. 

On the colder side of warm, Rey has cast herself in a grey cloak and is standing beneath the Falcon again, hand outstretched to touch the nearest dribble of rain. Water is a miracle she will never recover from, and she lets it run through her touch again now, slipping over her calluses, running cool over the tender webbing between her fingers, then sliding down her wrist. She holds her breath, and then, she _reaches out._

All sound vanishes, sucked into the hollow of her inner ear, and she casts her hunting mind forward. The force vibrates around her. Below her. Inside of her. She _looks_ . She is still always looking for _him_ , however foolish she knows it is. She hasn’t felt his presence since he vanished on Exegol in her arms. Perhaps _that_ is the cruelest thing of all, she thinks. That she hadn’t felt him pass. Not with peace and purpose, nor with any other feeling. No fanfare or reward at the end of _his_ brutal path. He had simply... disappeared. Ceased, as if a word unspoken. Rey reaches further, strains harder, digs deeper. He had found her here once upon a time, hadn’t he? Over merciless lightyears of the void of deep space, the Force had propelled his presence towards her like a meteorite, until they had met on just such a rainy day. So, she _reaches_. 

Beneath Rey, she feels the ground, saturated with rotting debris and the bones of ancient creatures long since dead. Roots twist and insects burrow, gravity clenching the mass of the planet in place. 

_Deeper_. 

The planet’s core, dense and molten and wild with life, like a seed full of potential, ready to burst into bloom as an effervescent star. 

_Farther_.

Outer space. The Unknown Regions, pulsing with danger. Rogue storms, pulsars, gravity wells, and a labyrinth of magnetospheres few ships ever dared to traverse. A hidden, distorted blackness, rippling with the powers of the Force. 

_Go farther--_

And beyond the Unknown--

_\--farther!--_

A mirror. 

Rey comes upon it sharp and sudden, stopped short. It is flat, and cold, and impenetrable, and though she can touch it, it doesn’t show her reflection. It is fogged over, even shadows obscured. She runs her hand across its surface and frost flakes off and flecks her legs. It is _freezing cold._ The wall stretches in every direction, up, down, left, right, icy and edgeless, blocking her passage forward. A lack of possibility. An end to her path. 

_ENOUGH!_

Rey is sucked abruptly back into the present, like a rock plunging beneath the surface of a lake, and once again her hand is wet with only rain. She jerks her shaken fingers close to her chest. When she looks down, she rubs her fingertips together just to feel the reality of it again. Just rain. Just rain. 

Layers of old feelings shatter and criss-cross. Just rain. _Rain._

The rain hisses. 

‘ _You’re a monster.’_ the old memory accuses. 

_‘...yes, I am.’_ he whispers back. 

  
  


Rey wishes she could cry. Tears had never come uneasily before. Things might be more _manageable_ if she could cry. _Oh_ . She wishes. _Wishes. Wishes_ . But like before, the rain is what does her weeping for her, because the half of her that could cry in earnest has maybe died and gone away with _him_ too. And so now she wonders if this is all that’s left? Only the mirror, without a reflection in it. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


“That’s complete nonsense! Can’t you see?” Rey chastises Chewie during another one of their evening tet-a-tets. She’s stoking a bonfire in the courtyard outside of Luke’s cabin, inside of which she has slowly begun to move all of her personal possessions. “I’m _staying_ , and you can’t expect to live your life just _watching_ me live mine! I won’t let you.” 

Chewbacca is very verbal tonight, as he has constantly been about his displeasure in Rey’s recent decision making, but tonight there is something extra that seems to be bothering him. He dislikes her desire to take up Luke’s old mantle as temple guardian, but he is also incapable of feeding her a good enough reason why she _shouldn’t_ . This except for the obvious point, ‘ _your friends would miss you._ ’ 

Rey frowns at him, and thinks for a while that she almost misses the nearly silent Chewie she had first met that had escorted Han on all their years of low pay adventuring. As she shoves a bundle of twigs down beneath the hottest embers, his last point catches her attention as if snagging her on a hook, and she looks up. 

“What do you mean a life-debt? To who?”

Chewie explains, and Rey’s face goes slack. Her hand slowly lowers from the fire, until she is staring at him in surprise and confusion. “But Han is dead.” Her face hitches, “There’s nobody left to transfer the debt to. Shouldn’t that excuse you? Custom or no, without anyone to be indebted to, wouldn’t you-?”

Once again the Wookie interrupts Rey, and this time her face goes from confused to scandalized. “Wh- _Any_ Skywalker?”

With a wild buzzing sound, D-O shoots off the ledge of a nearby footpath and crashes into Rey’s shoulder as two Lanai guardians chase after it with brooms raised. They gesture rudely at the droid, who whips around on its wheel and attempts to back up beneath Rey’s legs as much as possible, yelling, ‘NO THANK YOU! NO THANK YOU!’ 

Frustrated, Rey lifts a leg up to give the droid a place to hide, but also turns at the same time to offer some sort of consolation to the temple guardians. But the Lanai are already backing off again in a huff, clearly not pleased by the fire, or by Rey’s choice in company. She chews on the inside of her cheeks as they go, the moment lost to her suddenly overly-full brain. Then she pulls D-O out from beneath her robe and sets it straight again. It rolls back and forth in place in nervy anxiety. 

“I thought I told you to stay on the Falcon, you little stow-away!” She accuses it, with an undertone of affection. D-O spins in an agitated circle and proclaims, “ALONE. LONG TIME. ALONE.”

It seems cruel to tell the droid to return to the ship after it had obviously made such a bold journey to join them in the rocky dark, and so Rey only sighs and lets it stay. But it is only when she looks back up at Chewbacca that she sees his knowing gaze. At first Rey is embarrassed to be caught behaving so hypocritically, but as she thinks about it, her expression softens. _Practice what you preach_ , the fire seems to whisper louder than the crackling wood. 

“Alright, I see your point. But, I _promise_ you, it’s different. _You_ shouldn’t stay. Because of _me_. I don’t think… I’m… I’m not... ” Rey muddles her words, hurt and loss wrestling in her stomach in equal parts. “I’m not _right_ , anymore, Chewie.” 

This is a private, terrible thought that she has kept very close to the chest until now, and Chewie doesn’t interrupt her as she stares at the fire. Then, she stares somewhere backwards in time to a place beyond the fire. Her voice grows quiet, barely even there. “ _Nobody_ should be around me. Because, when they get too close, bad things happen to them. My parents. Han. Luke. Leia. And…” Rey’s breath sucks in tight on the next name, still too sharp a shard in her throat to speak out loud. She gives a half-truth, because it is easier. “...Half of me is dead already. On Exegol.” 

Even D-O goes still, in order to turn it’s cone up and peer at Rey’s face in silent wonder. Rey has not spoken to anyone about the things which had transpired on the bedeviled Sith planet. Not a word, except that Palpatine was dead. The other missing presence in the conversation has haunted Rey every waking moment since. All the moments between then and now, _he_ has been a phantom, in the way even Finn hadn’t asked, but only looked at her and known. There, and yet not there. In her arms, and then, _not_ in her arms. Rey bites the tip of her tongue, teetering on the threshold of continuing. Surely, Chewbacca would listen. If anybody had a prayer’s chance of understanding what had happened on Exegol, _surely_ it would be the uncle of a sad little boy who had been missing for a very, very long time. 

But when the moment comes, Rey pulls back. “I don’t want anything to happen to you. You’re the last of them.”

She doesn’t have to say _the last of the Skywalker family_ for Chewbacca to understand the sentiment. When she looks up at him with pain in her expression, almost pleading for his understanding, he goes to her, wrapping her in a bristly hug that smells like moss and leather and musk. Rey leans into it, quietly grateful, but she won’t give herself the boon of Chewie’s comfort for too long. A moment more and she briskly pulls back again with an air of forced propriety. She has already said too much. 

“Well then, that settles it! You’ll take D-O and the Falcon and leave after I’ve set up properly here. Let’s call it a week? Yes, I think that’s right. What’s for dinner?”

“EAT.” D-O merrily proclaims, his recent physical trauma all but forgotten. “-you have - a - STOMACH.” 

Rey knows they will argue again tomorrow. But for now, because he is kind hearted, Chewie lets her have the last word. 

  
  


✶

  
  
  


The stars go on and on, stretching out in an endless sea. For a while the fire is a warm orange glow in Rey’s peripheral vision as she stretches out to sleep, and she looks at everything and nothing. She imagines she can feel _him_ nearer in moments like these; she has seen all of him, after all, in bits and parts, and keeps it close. As close as the thousands of nights of stargazing they both have spent alone. As close as the blood in her veins. In glimpses before, she has felt the larger crystalline structure of the life of that man. Or, something resembling a man, anyway… not a beast like the mask he presented to the world, but maybe yet a child, inside the body of a man. She listens to the sound of her own heart beating, and to the distant sussurations of the ocean as it tides against the rocky beach. His name is a taste on her lips as she slips beneath the surface, and into dreams. She never could help her dreams of him; one body is simply too small a vessel for two lifetimes worth of memories. And in dreams, he’s still with her in a way he isn’t anymore when waking. Or maybe, she is with him. _There. There. There._ Rey sleeps, and she remembers. 

  
  
  
  
  


Chandrila is very green, and sometimes it is very blue, but it is always beautiful, even in the deepest crevices of the ivory city of Hanna, erstwhile-seat of the New Republic, perched on the lip of the Silver Sea. Even in his memories, there is something soft about the way the clouds brush against the skin of the water; Ben imagines he can still feel the wind on his face, even though the truth of it is he hasn’t smelled fresh water in years. But then, there are many, many other things he has left behind on Chandrila. 

There are the green rolling hills Ben recalls having onced loved, soft with moss and fine grasses beneath his hands. As a child, he would walk with his scrolls out to his favorite old tree to read in the sun. Ben remembers that tree, gnarled with age and wizdom, and he remembers the glint of the sea in the distance, and the hot silver lines of faraway starfighters blazing through the clear sky, back towards Landing Platform OB-99 where pilots went to learn and live. 

Ben remembers from Chandrila also watching storms roll into land from miles out over the Silver Sea. How the colors bled together until black and white and red and green and blue had become slowly gray. He recalls the cool, rushing hiss of rain... but he tempers himself before he gets too far into the recollection, since such sounds don’t follow off a planet’s surface. This is a very deeply buried hurt. He must be careful and meticulous about how far he allows himself to remember certain things. Space is quiet as the grave. So sometimes Ben lets in the sounds of Chandrila at night when things become just a little _too_ quiet, alone in his quarters on _The Supremacy_. He allows himself to drink a glass of water, if just to quench these unquenchable recollections, and then Ben tries to sleep. 

But sleep has never come easily. Snoke is there, whispering in the dark as he always has, and more importantly because this is when the tender recollections of grass and ocean and home grow strongest; because before he sleeps Ben is weakest, and weakness is not a quality he can tolerate about himself.

Ben often dreams of water, and sometimes, if he is very, _very_ unlucky, he also dreams of green archipelagoes, teeming with verdant plantlife. He hates these dreams, more than the half-nightmare, half-reality of Snoke’s huge, scaly fingers wrapping around his throat. Ben is exhausted by these old attachments, and of Snoke bearing witness and passing judgement on his every moment of undisciplined thought. He is sick every night with the surety that later, he will pay for his sentimental indiscretions. 

If only Ben could cut these things out of himself! If only he could extract what he wanted, and temper the rest with fire... With rock, with lava, with sharp black obsidian. With a blade, he would have made short work of it all, a long, long time ago. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


Smoke fills the ship and Chewbacca collapses out of the entry ramp covered in Porgs as Rey runs drills on the seashore. The pesky birds have burrowed deep into the interior of the Falcon by now, and Chewie has been digging feathers, wet-packed mud, and broken egg goo out of the auxiliary cooling system all morning, apparently with little luck. He can’t bring himself to kill the pathetic creatures, which Rey finds endearing, but without lethal intent there isn’t much he can do to prevent his new tenants from permanently moving in. Rey says nothing about this and moves through her saber drills, smiling a little to herself as the Porgs push Chewie’s patience a little farther than Rey is capable. 

Physical training is a relief. Rey has always liked feeling useful, and usefulness directly connects to physical capability. On Jakku she hadn’t had much need to keep up with her form; sand crawling and wreckage scaling did the worst work for her. Just staying alive on Jakku was a daily challenge. Nowadays Rey feels pathetic if she doesn’t devote a sizeable chunk of each sun cycle to rehearsing the choreography Master Luke had taught her. And she likes the feel of her new lightsaber. Yellow is a color she has long been familiar with, and at its heart the saber’s core has been forged from a piece of the legacy blade, so it seems right to wield it here. Not with the purpose of violence, but only with the desire to feel the lazer slice through the air, to feel the kyber crystal humming in her palm, vibrating in her bones, and whispering affectionately inside her mind and heart. For the first time in her life, the blade she wields is truly hers, made without intention to defend or attack, but only to exist in a kind of harmony somewhere in-between. She still keeps the old Jedi Texts close, and they have much to say on things that exist in the middle realm, even if she can’t understand everything she reads. Though she has a very fine ear for languages, she is only a fair reader, and an even worse writer. 

Grumbling, Chewbacca dusts himself off and stands up as his basket of overturned Porgs half flees into the reeds, and half runs back up the gangplank and into the ship. A few still doggedly cling to Chewie’s fur, and he bats one off his shoulder as he looks over the horizon. He is just starting to wave at the far ocean and gather Rey’s attention when D-O also whizzes down the ramp and stops up short next to the Wookie. 

“STORM.” D-O announces, and Chewie howls in agreement. “DANGER. INSIDE.” 

Rey looks up for the first time in hours, and retracts her lightsaber with an electric zap. She blinks at Chewie and D-O, then looks out over the ocean herself, a hand raising to shade her eyes. Sure enough, rolling in from the west is a nasty black wall of clouds. But further, unlike most other storms on Ahch-To thus far, this one sparks long yellow fangs of lightning that strike the surface of the water. Inside, her stomach twists in a confusing knot of fear and longing at once. Rey doesn’t think that she has ever liked lightning. 

  
  
  


✶

The storm is fiercer even than they expect, and Rey sits at the Hologram board playing a game of Dejarik with Chewbacca that she only half pays attention to. They listen to objects rattling on their shelves as the violent wind outside roughly buffets the hull of the ship, and Chewie physically jumps when a lightning strike hits the portside passive sensor antenna and the air inside the Falcon briefly fills with a static charge. When the static fades, Rey sits back with a huff, her hackles still unsettled. Something is churning in the air tonight other than electricity, and she feels a mounting sensation of anxiety she still can’t quite put her finger on. 

Thunder peels, low and long enough to rattle her teeth, and Rey finally gives up on the game with a huff of defeat. She doesn’t have the focus for it. Chewie makes as if to complain, but another bolt of lightning hits the ship and a minor alarm sets off in the cockpit, and so he is up and off to tend to the issue before it can get out of hand. 

“NO THANK YOU.” D-O is announcing to the ceiling as the Falcon rumbles, and Rey rolls out of the lounge and begins to pace the deck. 

“Do you feel that?” She asks the droid curiously, though after she has said it she knows it wouldn’t quite understand what she means.

"A- very- BIG STORM.” D-O replies, “DANGER. NO THANK YOU!” Rey frowns, considers that a moment, and then she closes her eyes. 

The storm is huge. She doesn’t need the Force, _or_ D-O to know the Falcon on the shore of the beach is near the epicenter of it all. But she slows down her breathing anyway, taking measured inhalations through her nose, then exhalations through her mouth. The storm is much too strong for the natural weather patterns of the island, she thinks again, it can’t be a coincidence. She quiets her mind, and then she _reaches out._

The atmosphere above the ship sparks with angry electricity. Rey sees purple and red lightning skewering grey masses of cumulonimbus, and she sees the ocean rushing up the rocky beach to pool around the Falcon’s landing gear. She feels the ancient mountains groan against the wail of the wind, and below, how the land shifts and settles to adapt. But there is something else, too. Something nagging her, a little farther than she can reach. Rey’s eyebrows draw together, and she pushes farther. 

She feels the call again, very far away, and wonders at it. _Darkness_ calls to Rey, like a hollow broken bell. She had not expected to hear that voice again. With Palpatine and the remaining Skywalkers both dead and gone, that age-old struggle should have quieted. The Jedi temple is quiet. The stump where the gnarled Uneti tree once housed the sacred texts is quiet too. And yet, the dark place still murmurs. She knows this old story very well, the dull, soundless tone more a vibration in her chest, or a fist meant to wrap itself up in her intestines to pull her towards something. She is much stronger now than she used to be, and so when she feels it again she doesn’t fear it like she did that first time. But she _is_ surprised. And _curious_. 

_‘Who are you?’_ Rey quests out. Her fingers curl into open air as her hand raises, almost as if to brush against the surface of the thing that calls. 

It replies. 

_‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’_

_‘What do you want from me?’_

_‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’_

_‘How do you know me?’_

But it only echoes again without a voice, ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ 

  
  


The main power supply to the Falcon abruptly shuts off and the room is plunged into immediate blackness. A moment later the auxiliary kicks in and light returns, though the deck is bathed now in a muted emergency red. Chewbacca is howling in confusion from the direction of the cockpit, more alarms sounding than before, and Rey returns to consciousness already on full alert. She shuffles back when D-O knocks into her ankle. ‘STORM. STORM. STORM!’ the little droid cries in distress, and all at once Rey knows what she must do. 

By the time Chewie’s head swings around the corridor to the sound of the entry ramp lowering, Rey is already swathed in a heavy cloak and halfway outside. She doesn’t stop as he calls after her, but she does wave a hand over her shoulder in at least a half-acknowledgement of his presence as she springs into the rain. “Don’t _worry_ about me, Chewie, I’ll be fine! There’s just something I need to see! It’ll be alright!” 

Neither the Wookie nor the droid seem willing or able to follow her, and before Rey knows it, their voices and the Falcon's alarm systems are muted anyway by the rushing hiss of rain. 

Rey is immediately soaked, but intuition leads her on as she scales the side of the mountain, ankle-deep in rushing rivers of storm drain. The voice in her head is gone but the resonance still remains, like the aftermath of metal striking metal. She wants to know what it wants, and further, she _needs_ to know _why_ it is calling. This weather cannot be mere coincidence. Leia had always counselled her to give credence to her instincts, and now Rey flies over slippery rocks, and climbs on all-fours in the places where the path grows too narrow and dangerous during her ascent around the jagged peak. She rounds the farthest top ledge, but she doesn’t turn towards the Jedi temple as she thought she might, but instead plunges immediately down the other side. 

She descends. Rey squints against the barrage of rain, her vision half-blinded by the ferocity of the wind. But she knows her destination very well, and as the mud slips beneath her feet and she takes a tumble, corrects herself, and resumes her run down the slope, she thinks she sees a figure ahead of her, glowing through the violent storm. There, below, where the path curves even farther back towards the shadowed side of Temple Island, is a blue facade. The shape of a man. _Master_ _Luke_. 

All at once Rey’s throat is full of her own beating heart, and she stumbles again, going hard down on one knee. Her pants tear and she feels stone cutting into her flesh, but she rises again without pause, now more sure than ever the path laid out in front of her is the correct one. Her run only hastens, and she throws her arms out on either side as she practically flies down the last and steepest embankment, but when she stumbles to the place Luke had been standing, now there is only rain and more rain. This is only a momentary distraction, before her mind is rushing forward again, followed shortly by her feet. She continues on. Luke must be a waypoint, she thinks. A signpost, pushing her towards whatever waits below. 

Powerful light, powerful dark. The hole is as she remembers it, but somehow even more sinister in the rain. Rey approaches the rim, and pauses with caution at the edge, water rushing around her ankles and falling into the chasm below. She can hear the water at the bottom burbling in pleasure as the cave engorges on storm drain, filling up the echoing chamber with a rushing hiss. It was a _long fall_ before _,_ she recalls. Or, was it? The memories collide now that she is here again, her heart hammering just as loud as the storm. The creeping vines that ring the entrance to the dark temple make the water seem black, and Rey sets a foot on them as she peers nervily into the pit. 

_‘Push, Rey.’_

When she looks up, Rey squints again through the rain and thinks a flicker of blue might have caught her eye just a moment ago, though now it is gone again. 

“Master Luke!” She cries out, now more confident than ever that he is here. _Somewhere_ . “Just _tell me what to do!_ Why did you call me? What is this?” 

But silence meets her again except for the rush of rain, and inside her heart Rey falters, and thinks of the soundless striking of the bell that called her on the deck of the Falcon. Luke would never summon with such a voice. Someone else, then. _No_ , she settles. Not Luke. 

“...Alright, Rey.” She mutters to herself, steeling her stomach for what’s to come. “Nothing for it.” 

She sucks in a deep breath, and then she leaps in. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


Rey hits the water with almost no sound, and slices deep into its icy depths like a blade. Almost too deep, she fears, but soon enough her arms pull her back up towards the surface, and she kicks comets of black bubbles in trails behind her as she pushes off the old bones of ancient creatures still half-sunk in the sediment. It is only when she bursts to the surface again with a mighty gasp that she begins to suspect something has gone terribly wrong. 

The cave is completely white. Rey shivers uncontrollably as she wades to the lake’s shore, and when she pulls herself up onto solid ground she is shocked to feel that the stone isn’t white at all, but it is merely covered in a thick layer of ice. The underlying structure is the same... only, no surface has been left uncovered. Everything gleams. Everything is as if made of white glass. 

The cave itself is deadly silent, and Rey walks in awe of the fact that the storm outside is now completely inaudible. It may as well not even _exist_ to this place. Instead, the only sounds that follow her now are the drip-drops of water off her cloak, and the crunch of ice beneath her feet as she wanders slowly further into the labyrinthine cave system. 

Light reflects off of every surface, though Rey is sure she cannot find the source of any of it. She is half-surprised she hadn’t needed to produce her lightsaber to forge her way through its many snaking black halls, like she had the first time, back when she had come here and been lost in more ways than one. She is _still_ lost now, she thinks with a twisting pang of sadness, though very differently than before. The first time, her fear was one of the unknown. Being unwanted. Being unseen. Now, she knows herself. It is the _future_ she fears more than anything, and the many years of self-imposed silence she has sentenced upon herself. She had _meant_ to come to this island alone, and that is how she _means_ to end things. Ice, she supposes, is fitting.

_‘Who are you?’_ Rey quests out again with the force, and again, it answers her. This time, it is much louder.

  
  


_‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’_

_‘Tell me what you want!’_

_‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’_

_‘You have me. I’m here! Where are you?’_

_‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey.’ ‘Rey?’_

  
  


The new voice makes Rey’s connection falter, and she stumbles a little. That last entreaty, had been… a voice. A real voice. Not a distinctly recognizable one, but one that still _felt_ familiar, somehow. A voice maybe from a very long time ago. 

_‘It’s me. I’m Rey. I’m here.’_

_‘Rey?’ ‘Rey?’_

That voice. That voice was..? Rey stops up short, her mind whirling. On Exagol. She had heard that voice before. The voice of a Jedi. She takes another halting step forward, and the floor collapses beneath her.

Ice crumbles under her feet and suddenly she yells out as she falls through the shallow bridge and plummets downward. When she hits the ground again for a moment she lies still in stunned silence, unsure if she has broken something vital. The cold has crept into her bones, and if any of her is shattered, Rey doesn’t think at the moment she would even be able to tell. But she blinks awhile at the ceiling of the cave, a gleaming opalescent white, and then she sits up. Her bones are, thankfully, all intact. She had landed in a snowbank. But when she stands and sees what room she has fallen into, she looses her breath again for a second time. 

The farthest wall of the hollow expanse is a flat mirror. It takes a terrible moment of swallowing her heart back down her throat to feel the Force as it radiates from the reflectionless surface. She knows this place. She has been here before. 

_‘Rey?’ ‘Rey?’_ “Rey?”

The last word is _spoken_. Not felt. Spoken. 

Twisting around in utter frustration, Rey wrings at her hair and screams at the ceiling, “Who are you? What do you want from me?!” 

The mirror calls. A low, silent humm. A fist in her intestines, twisting forward. A _pull_. 

This time, there is no hall of reflections to contend with. No infinite Rey, no vortex of black. Rey’s possibilities have arrived at as abrupt an end as the mirror ends the room. Like she had seen it before in her many probes, the surface is flat and cold, and flecked by crystals of ice that form metallic patterns, which clarify as she approaches. But there is no reflection in its surface. Not even a shadow. Ice is a spiritual sound, clear and resonant, but the mirror makes a deeper, even more beautiful noise, something close to both love and despair, as if singularly crystallized. 

“...What could _you_ show me?” A tentative hand reaches out, but Rey still doesn’t touch it. She’s not quite sure why she even questions the mirror at all. She thinks her heart must be broken, though her grief is still too large a thing to pin down with as insufficient a thought as that. The mirror hadn’t shown her any answers before. She had begged it, the bitter recollection returns. _Begged_. And it had given nothing. How could this time be any different? “I already know my place in this story.” 

It doesn’t answer, and the cave, the mirror, and everything else grows completely still. Sound vanishes completely, sucked into Rey’s inner ear. Her breath in her throat, she finally lays her palm flat on the glass, and one last time, despite everything, she gives in and asks for what she has always feared the most. 

  
  


“Show me my family.” 

The frost melts beneath Rey’s palm as easily as sunlight warming away morning dew, and beyond her own vivid reflection on the other side of the mirror, a galaxy of spinning stars unfurls. A vortex of moving passages illuminate footpaths floating in space, sundials made of white light glowing brighter than ice, and shooting stars slice through the sanguine blackness and explode in distant silver fireworks. Rey feels the voices on the other side of the glass, one piled on top of the next, nearer, farther, older, younger. Voices she has known, Master Luke, Leia, Han, Rey’s own parents, and other voices too. Some she does not precisely know, but _feels_ she knows, and others wiser and older who she has never encountered before. 

_‘Was I any different, when you taught me?’ ‘Your weapon, you will not need it.’ ‘I have lived long enough to see the same eyes in different people.’ ‘You’re my only hope.’ ‘You will find that it is you who are mistaken, about a great many things.’ ‘I fear nothing. For all is as the Force wills it.’ ‘Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.’ ‘Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.’_

And then he is there.

“ _Ben_ !” Rey cries out, and shoves both her palms hard into the glass. Walking along one of the silver paths is Ben Solo. His eyes are distant, distracted by some precarious thought, but he still looks exactly as he did that deadly night on Exegol, his lip split and his shirt torn, but his shoulders decidedly lighter than they had ever been. He is whole, unharmed, and it is only when she feels it on her feet that Rey understands she has tears streaking down her face. “ _Ben_ !” She cries out again, and hammers on the glass with her fist. “I’m _here_! Ben!” 

_‘Push, Rey!’_ Luke’s voice is with her again, and Rey backs up, scrub an angry hand across her face, and hits the glass. Nothing happens, and so she pushes again. 

_‘Push_!’ 

Rey strikes the glass a third time and her fist splits open, bleeding openly and smearing across the crystalline surface. But Ben has paused a few feet away, his body grown still in expression and intensity, and Rey sees him turn his face towards her direction through the smear of red she has made. He can’t see her, but maybe, just maybe, he can _feel_ her. 

This time, she reaches out with the Force, and strikes the mirror again. The wall shakes, and chunks of ice rain down as scattered debris on her head. Ben takes a single step in her direction, his face lit sharp with attention and focus. 

“Ben!” Rey pleads, her face raw, her stomach on fire. She reaches out to him with her soul, coming up against the cold surface of the mirror as she had before, time and time again. “Look at me!” Again, she winds back and strikes the mirror, before with a gasp she realizes her own stupidity and reaches for her lightsaber. “I’m here! I’m _here_!” She shouts and grits her teeth, and ignites her blade, raising it high above her head. 

_‘Push, Rey!’_

He looks timeless in that moment, drifting close enough now to the mirror’s skin to be able to reach out and touch Rey. His eyes have gone from shrewd to something deeper, a ponderous vastness that speaks louder than any word which has ever come out of his mouth. It is a look of clarity, which had fortified Rey on Exegol, the kind that indisputably spoke the truth of his very _Ben-ness,_ his redemption made flesh in a singular expression of hope. For a split second Rey questions if her saber strike could harm him, but her own hope blazes up to match his in perfect synchronicity, and she brings the lightsaber down in a mighty arc. Glass shatters and silver sparks shoot out in every direction, and the door between worlds gives way. Without sight, without thought, Rey shoots out a hand and grabs Ben by the arm, and she gives a mighty heave. 

They land on the floor of the cave together as mirror shards and chunks of icicle rain down on their heads, and Rey automatically throws herself on top of Ben to shield him. The cave gives a demonic rumble and before she knows what has happened the remaining ceiling begins to give. Ben rolls from his stomach to his back, pulling Rey in towards his chest on one side as his other hand shoots out and he grabs the largest portion of the collapse with the Force before it has an opportunity to crush them. The gesture he uses to throw the ice is erratic and malicious, and it flies over their heads and explodes against the opposite wall. When it is done he falls back flat again, but continues to lie rigid with adrenaline, breathing hard through his nose, and Rey feels his body trembling against hers. She has never touched this much of a man at once in her entire life, and has no space to digest the moment. Ben gives an irregular huff in the stark silence of the aftermath, and then his head finally falls back against the ice. His body goes limp. 

Slowly, Rey sits up. 

When she looks down, Rey lets her breath out in a rush. Ben’s eyes are closed, but his chest still rises and falls in a regular pattern. Passed out cold. Over-exhausted, maybe, but _alive_. His cheeks are warmed with blood, even if his eyes are sunken in sleep. She looks up, and is confounded again to see the mirror is no longer a reflection of that starry place. Now, it is only a mirror again. Not a reflectionless, shadow-eating surface, nor an ominous ending to the lonely story of one, but just a mirror. An ordinary mirror, showing the inside of the partially collapsed cave, and the pale shell of Rey’s own waxy face. The cave floor is littered with just ice again, and Rey’s saber lies safely on the floor at her side. 

But something else has healed too. It takes a little longer for Rey to pick up on this detail, but once caught, the realization wells up inside of her as warm as a stoked flame. Flickering beneath the surface as a constant reassurance, she feels the Force shift, then settle comfortably into place. _The bond_.

Without words for it before, she had only been able to define its presence by its absence. The magnetic desire for something missing that had forever pulled her into space has been mollified. The whisper in the back of her mind which had always drawn her eyes out over the horizon now pulls them down towards the man on the floor. Her other half. What had been missing. 

Ben Solo’s life force. 

More than a marvel, more than a miracle, the dyad had been real after all. Though in the face of the feeling that washes over her now, Rey knows it had _always_ been real. This is a truth she will have to work over in her mind for years to come, but it’s truth still resonates nonetheless. In its absence, the bond had only been purified. So now she reaches out, and lets herself touch Ben’s face. It is, without a doubt, the most selfish thing she has ever done. She can hear his mind, and at last, another generous tear slicks down her cheek. He isn’t dreaming. But he feels… _peaceful_. This, in and of itself, seems more beautiful even than a simple rain to a scavenger from a planet made of sand. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  
  


Rey looks up from her seat on the wall overlooking the stone village where Ben lies sleeping, a vigilant guard in the night. A fire is crackling outside of Luke’s hut, and so she can see the door clearly, though she thinks if Ben wakes, she will feel it before he gathers enough strength to stand and make an exit. Even now, she knows their bond has exponentially increased. She feels attached to him spiritually and bodily in a way she would have found uncomfortable before, if it didn’t instead satisfy all of her latent needs in every conceivable fashion. Mostly, she is staggered by his very _aliveness_ at all. That by itself is a constant, resonating shock. Though she is overwhelmed and deeply humbled by the presence of the living Ben Solo, she cannot help but wonder, what will it mean to talk with him when he wakes, on terms of equality? What does one discuss with someone who already knows the inside of your mind? Ben is inexplicably, miraculously, and riotously alive; Rey could scream. One is sitting behind her breastbone, waiting to be exalted. But it will take work to navigate the meaning of a functioning dyad. For now, she wants him to sleep. Rey allows her heart it's quiet fullness. 

A blue light casts over her hands and Rey sighs. “Master Luke.” She says, her voice unsurprised. Of course he comes to her _now_. 

“You know, I’ve always been fond of happy endings.” the Force ghost is clear as blue gem, and Luke takes an easy seat next to Rey and looks down over the village. The storm has rolled back and the stars are out again, clear and calm in the aftermath. Rey doesn’t look at Luke, but looks up at the sky instead. The same old stars she has seen a thousand times before suddenly feel very beautiful. 

“Is that what this is? A happy ending?” 

At first Luke doesn’t respond, and then, cryptically, he suggests, “It _could_ be.”

“You always did love your secrets.” This finally pulls a grin out of Rey.

“And for that, I’ll always be sorry. Rey, you suffered because of my misgivings. I was wrong to keep you in the dark. Forgive an old man his follies.” 

“There’s nothing to forgive.” Her response is immediate and sincere, and Rey finally looks down to regard her master. Luke smiles in return, his old eyes warm with love. Nothing is lost between them, this she knows. But there are still answers Luke might be able to give. Rey chews on all her thoughts, swirling around in an orrery of complications in her mind. “What happened? What was that place?” 

“An Argent Coda.” Luke supplies without preamble. Rey quirks her head. 

“A what?” 

“Think of it as a door that moves. There are places, here, in the Unknown Regions, that lie closer to the boundaries between worlds. The mirror became a door because the Force _needed_ it to be a door. Because _you_ could utilize it. You've been calling it, even if you didn't mean to. And you’ve really _wounded_ your old uncle Luke’s pride, you know? I thought I taught you to lean quite a bit more _in one direction_ than you ended up!” He gives a rueful grin. Automatically, Rey’s hand goes to her lightsaber. Not to ignite, but only to touch. Yellow. A guardian. To her, it is a symbol of peace and prosperity that might still be found in the median. Not light _or_ dark. Something else. A new way. 

“And as for my naughty nephew? Well!” Luke chuckles, “He couldn’t move on. Not completely. Half of him was anchored to this plane, to _you_ . I’m not entirely sure I approve, but I suppose it all ended the right way. You’re safe and sound, and my nephew lives. He fell into the place between worlds, where time doesn’t exist. The Argent Coda is an agent of the Force. It doesn’t inherently appear to the dark _or_ the light, but what it does is act as a nature of balance. A balance that was knocked askew by Ben’s death. It gave you an _opportunity_ , and you took it.” He pauses, another wicked twinkle in his eye, “Just like you took my library.” 

Exasperated, Rey throws her hands up in the air and she springs lightly off the wall. “Well you wouldn’t _teach_ me anything I _needed_! I had to go to Leia for that, didn’t I?” 

Looking sheepish, Luke tucks his chin in. “Be honest. Was she a better master?” 

Rey laughs and shakes her head disbelievingly, and they look back out over the village together. Nothing moves except the fire, not even the temple caretakers awake to see this simple conversation between parent and child. Eventually, Rey’s smile fades, and worry replaces it. 

“Am I strong enough for this? I don’t know what I’m doing.” she grows apprehensive. “...who _is_ he? Now. After all of that?” 

“You know _exactly_ who he is. _You._ More than anyone.” 

This feels like the greatest comfort of all. Rey looks to Luke once more in vulnerability and gratitude, before nodding once, as if almost to herself alone. A silent reassurance. “That’s why I couldn’t see you before. I could only hear you. The dyad was only half-functional. I wasn’t strong enough by myself.”

Luke shakes his head. “It’s not a hyperdrive you can take apart and put back together. You’ve always been too literal!” A thought comes to him, and then he chuckles again. He stands, and hovers close to her, as if to reach out and embrace. Rey knows he isn’t able to do so, but she turns towards him with her eyebrows canted up all the same. “Give it time. Ben has always run on emotions first, and words second. Let him show you. Everyone’s sacrifices all bear fruit in you.The future belongs to you both, and you’re free to make it what you want. The Force will always be with you, but _you_ are with you too, every day. Be happy, Rey.”

Suddenly afraid, Rey starts forward, and her outstretched hand passes through Luke’s body as he begins to fade. “Will I ever see you again?” 

  
  


“Look to the Force. I’ll be waiting there for you. Always. All of us will be.” 

  
  


Along the distant peaceful horizon, the black lip of the ocean splits apart and a seam of orange slices across the water. Rey looks towards it. Luke vanishes as dawn rises clean and clear, and yellow light spills across the door to the hut where Ben Solo lies sleeping. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

Ben sleeps for a day and a night, and then for another day. Rey isn’t frightened by this; his mind is a constant presence in the back of her own now and she carries him wherever she goes. He’s calm, wherever he is, more a warm gold sediment behind her regular thoughts than anything else. In a way, his dreamlessness is comforting, because Rey knows very well without having spoken a word to him about it that his sleep has _always_ been uneasy. They have always been the same, in ways Rey is only now beginning to fully recognize. So she isn’t anxious, and she doesn’t worry, and she isn’t afraid. Instead, Rey moves back and forth from the Falcon to the stone village, ferrying tools and materials she plans on using to build a silo for dried grain. 

On the afternoon of the second day, she feels a stirring in the back of her skull, and looks up with hands covered in mortar from the ring of foundation she has begun building. Raising a wrist to wipe sweat off her brow, she stands and cleans the mess off her hands on the front of her robe. The door to Luke’s cabin has not moved, but she feels the presence within it as it stirs. 

The day is clean, the sky clearer in the wake of so much rain than it has been in weeks. No cloud interrupts the endless stretch of blue, and every crack in the ground seems visible, every leaf and stem more cleanly defined. Her hair is a sweaty muss, and her clothes are brown with the dust of labor, but Rey’s feet drag her towards the hut before she knows her own body’s movements. For a moment she pauses outside the door, wondering if knocking would be more appropriate, but then she lays a quiet, callused hand on the metal and instead pushes through without a word. 

Rey is startled into stillness at first. She stands wordlessly in the doorway when she sees the flat brown back of one of Luke’s robes, topped by a mess of long hair. But then her breath slowly releases again, knowing she _isn’t_ looking on Luke, though she can’t keep back the sudden sting of tears when they well up a second later. Ben has found a change of clothing. In this case, Luke’s old master’s garb. The robes are a bit tight across his shoulders, if still reasonable. But even his size has done nothing to inhibit the way he seems to blend naturally into the scenery of his uncle’s hut. He almost looks like he belongs there.

He isn’t facing her. Instead, his fingers rest on what Rey presumes is the parchment on the small, hewn desk. But she knows he _feels_ her presence. 

“...This was Luke’s house.” His voice is neutral. More a statement of fact than a question. Rey blinks, and her toes curl in her shoes. Her affirmation is _felt by him_ , she can immediately tell. It seems strange, to speak so readily without using her voice at all, and yet it also feels like the most natural thing in the world. It takes some effort to swallow down enough saliva to actually speak out loud. 

“Now it belongs to me.” 

Rey feels the unspoken punctuation of laughter in Ben’s mind. Not cruel. Only a little disbelieving, and endlessly relieved. It almost feels like a smile, though it fades again after a moment. He knows where they are. He has plucked it out of her thoughts like a fresh daisy. He still doesn’t turn around, and Rey’s own fingertips tingle as he drags his across the table, off the parchment and into a fist. 

Even now his voice is still a little angry, but Rey isn’t fooled, because it _feels_ _wistful_ , underneath it all. Maybe even a little desperate. “...I couldn’t stand it if this was a dream.” 

Apprehensive, Rey pauses. She licks her lips, breath catching on the question. 

“If it was, would it be a good dream?” 

Her eyes dart all over Ben’s back, at the way his spine curves just enough that his head sinks forward a little too low, heavy with a weight even Rey can’t give a name to. But she feels it when her words fill Ben’s chest with air after she’s spoken, puffing him up too full with something unmanageable. It feels crisp. And white, and clean. _Hope,_ she realizes after a beat. Ben Solo can still readily feel _hope_ . Relief floods Rey in a way she hadn’t quite expected. Ben really _is_ still Ben after all. His head raises up a little higher from the low arc of his neck. 

“I think I’ve slept enough.” 

A hot tear streaks down Rey’s cheek and she takes a halting step towards him at the exact moment Ben turns and finally looks at her. They stare at each other only a moment, before both thoughtlessly move towards the other and Ben grabs Rey up in an ecstatic, violent embrace.

Rey feels Luke’s robes billow around her shoulders as Ben pulls her hard against his chest, his jaw shoving into the top of her skull as he crushes her against him. She can feel his desperation and his gratitude as loudly as her own, each striking the other in a chorus of reverberating affections. He hugs her so fiercely Rey feels herself lifted almost entirely off the tips of her toes, and she doesn’t even try to stop herself from rubbing her tear-streaked face joyfully into the front of his borrowed clothing. Something swells and crackles and passes between them, and when Ben reluctantly sets her back down on her feet and she pulls away just enough to see again, she’s met with a surprise; the soft moss that had grown in moderation between the cracks of Luke’s hut had all but exploded into flower. The hut’s interior wall is now veined in sweet-smelling blue. 

“Oh..!” Ben mutters in awe at this ripple in the Force, and Rey looks up at him and blinks with a peculiar sensation that _she_ had meant to say that. He looks down at her, and for the first time, she can see the boy he had been, all those years ago. His _real_ eyes aren’t monstrous at all; they are, in fact, very young. Ben has the overall countenance of someone who had recently been administered an antidote for a toxic venom. His mobility is returning now, slowly, to a body that before had been tightly clenched in a desperate brace against death. Now that he can breathe again, Ben’s wonder sits on the surface of his face as clean as a pool of clear water. 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to be apart.” Rey breathes, straight to the point and deadly serious, and she lifts a gentle hand to touch his cheek in wonder. She is still a little disbelieving of what she’s seeing. “Ever again.” She knows how desperate this sounds, and yet, between them it only feels like a statement of obvious fact. 

Ben’s face twitches, a very-nearly-smile that warms his eyes. He gazes down at Rey with a look that would have been smitten if she couldn’t feel how desperate it was beneath everything. For a terrifying moment, she thinks he will kiss her, and her fist goes tight in the front of his robes. She is very aware of that fact that she would _like_ him to kiss her. But he only touches her dirt-streaked face like she touches his, and she knows he is just as disbelieving of this gift as she is. “ _Tell me,_ Rey. Promise me this isn’t a dream.”

_‘It’s real.’_ Rey tries to push the sentiment through their bond, already learning, even now, that feelings speak more effectively than words. And this strange power is a gift she intends to _use_ . She gives only a second’s patience to the concept that their bond might one day yield even more novel abilities, but for now, she only wants to reassure. _‘I’m real. I’m here.You’re here, Ben. I found you. We’re together. This is real.’_

For a beat, Ben’s eyes widen as Rey’s bond thoughts come through loud and clear. She feels his surprise, and then his surge of savage pleasure. How strange that they should slot together so perfectly, she can practically hear him think. His mind is an analytical thing, but one that strategizes in colors and melodies and moods. She replies to him without words too, a mirror of his thoughts in her own mind; it _is_ strange that this power should work like it does. So completely. So immediately. They are in agreement, and an intense sensation of infatuation feeds back to Rey through the bond. It narrows Ben’s eyes, and makes his breath come faster. A shy smile pulls across Rey’s lips. This is a pristine moment of clarity; both knowing without a shadow of a doubt that everything which had been missing about the other had just incontrovertibly been repaired. Two who had been lost were now, _finally_ , found. 

There is a metal clang at the door and Ben and Rey break apart and look down to find D-O a scattered mess, spinning out in the pebbles on the ground. Ben lifts an eyebrow. 

“I- have a- STICK- a STICK- in my- in my- RECHARGE COUPLER.” Electricity sparks, followed by a fine plume of smoke, modulating the droid’s Basic verbalization. “ASSISTANCE- rrrrrRREEEEQUUIRED. REQUIRED.” 

Rey sighs. “Well, then where’s Chewie?” She feels Ben’s alarm in her mind at the exact moment his hand tightens its grip on her arm. She pauses, confused. Had he not already been able to _sense_ Chewbacca, nearby? 

“APPROACHING.” the droid yells, leaving no time for more pondering, then spins in a circle without going anywhere. Ben takes a physical step back as Chewbacca’s footsteps loudly approach, and the Wookie leans curiously down to peer into the hut for Rey. 

Rey does not think a single moment of silence has hurt more since arriving on Ahch-To than this one. At first Chewie is shocked into stillness, and then all at once he lets out a furious roar and lurches towards Ben. Feeling Ben stuck to the spot, Rey’s instincts kick in before she even has a chance to consider her own actions, and she pushes him behind her and throws Chewie backwards, back out into the yard. Her Force throw is hard enough that he skids a few feet, before stopping, and Rey instantly gasps and covers her own mouth at what she’s just done. When she’s recovered from the shock, she darts out of the hut and runs to Chewie’s side, crouching down by his arm, her face a mess of guilt and apologies. 

“Chewie, I’m _sorry_ ! I’m _so sorry,_ are you alright? Can you stand? Please, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!”

Predictably, Wookies are made of stronger stuff, and so Chewbacca quickly sits up with little to no sign of damage. But his small brown eyes are flinty and dangerous where they have settled with venom on the figure of Ben, who has slowly ducked beneath the door frame and cautiously walked out into the yard. His face is an utter neutral.The silence drags on unbearably. 

Rey looks between the two of them, distressed to the point of snapping. “He’s _not_ leaving. I _want_ him here.” She emphatically declares at the Wookie, who temporarily turns his frosty look on her. The look _bleeds_. It demands a million questions, and at once bestows a million more shames. Rey does not think she has ever felt so shaken by someone’s scorn. 

“It’s alright, Rey.” Ben finally manages. When she feels for him, she is further distressed to find his emotions are suddenly as blank as his face is. She had known while he was with Snoke that Ben had been forced to control himself to hitherto unknown degrees, but his control right now is so complete it can only be recognized as frightening. “He has the right.” 

Chewbacca shakes Rey’s hand off and disjointedly stands. He’s slower now, and approaches Ben with the kind of snarl that suggests he is considering tearing Ben’s arm clean out of it’s socket. Ben holds perfectly still, and when Chewie gets close enough to smell him, Ben’s eyes flick down, until he only looks at the ground. His posture remains the same, broad-shouldered and strong, but he offers no challenge as Chewbacca stalks around his figure in a menacing circle. Every inch of Ben is judged, and though she feels like screaming out in protest, Rey knows this business isn’t hers to conclude. So she stands and waits, anxiously clenching and unclenching her fists. 

Finally, Chewbacca lets out one final roar loud enough to send Ben’s hair fluttering, and then the Wookie stalks off without another word, back down the path towards the shore. Considering Ben remains unharmed, she assumes this is the best possible outcome either of them could have hoped for. 

When he is gone, Ben finally lets out a long, shaky sigh. They listen to the whistle of the wind through the rooftops. “...You didn’t tell him. About me.” 

Another lurch of guilt rocks her stomach, and Rey sucks her lip up between her teeth. She shakes her head. Ben quietly digests this information, and then, with even less emotion, “So then, the Falcon…. my dad’s ship is here too.”

Rey nods, and Ben actually laughs out loud, though it isn’t funny or mirthful at all. “You _stole_ it.”

“I needed it.” Her lips tighten. She still can’t feel him, how come he can hear her? 

“There are other ships.” 

“Not like the Millennium Falcon.” 

“No,” Ben concedes, his own mouth growing tighter too. “...Not like the Falcon.” 

“ASSISTANCE REQUIRED!” a pathetic wisp of smoke wafts past him and Ben finally looks down at the droid at his feet. At first, he only examines it with a shrewd, uncaring expression, but then his eyes soften and he kneels. D-O approaches, and he turns the thing over on it’s side, until he uncovers a protruding chunk of tree that has lodged itself into the droid’s circuitry. With a deft twist of his fingers, he yanks the stick loose, and D-O chirps a rainbow of tones that feel like confusion and gratitude at the same time. When Ben sets it upright on it’s wheel again, it gives a few test rolls, then spins in a happy circle. 

“INTRUSION RECTIFIED.” 

D-O whizzes off, but instead of standing up, Ben stays knelt in the yard, and for a minute his eyes go distant. All at once, Rey is there again, on Starkiller Base that horrible night. Except she isn’t looking down on the scene she fears from above like she remembers, unable to help, but she is looking directly into the face of Han Solo himself. She feels his hand lurch in pain from where it is pressed against her cheek, and she feels the vicious burn of her lightsaber, buried deep in his chest. She smells cauterized flesh, and metal, and the sour stink of fear. Her hands are trembling. 

“Ben!” Rey starts forward, shaking herself out of the memory before it has the chance to hurt them any more. She is surprised, and a little frightened by how _vivid_ his memories are to her now. How she can almost taste them, like they had really happened to _her_. She goes to him without question, and reaches out to touch his sleep-tangled hair. This alone seems to be enough to pull Ben back from the brink, and he looks up with a sudden intake of breath. 

“Rey.” 

_‘It’s alright now. It’ll be alright.’_ she hums through the bond, her hand pushing, at first hesitantly, then more confidently, over his scalp. Even this gesture seems painfully intimate. Their connection is still so new. The strength of it… she knows Ben is also a little wary of it too. She wants them to be alright. But she isn’t sure if it _is_ true that they’ll be alright... at least, not right away. And she wonders if he can feel that as well. For Rey, the war has been very long. But for Ben, she suspects, it has been... longer. 

When her fingers finally curl behind his ear, Ben’s forehead slowly pitches forward until he presses it heavily into her thigh. His eyes close, and he quietly allows himself to lean against her. All of his ego has apparently been shed with his First Order uniform, and so he wordlessly supplicates himself at Rey’s feet as she combs through his many worries with her callused fingers. 

She knows what he knows. That this is only just the beginning. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


Over the following weeks, Ben Solo proves himself countless times to be both unusual and unexpected. At first, Rey is not sure what to do with him other than leave him be; he is sifting through a galaxy’s worth of troubles, after all, and she knows nobody can do that work for someone else. He has many things he holds himself violently accountable for, and Rey gets the feeling telling him to let go of those emotions would only come off as disrespectful and unrealistic. But she also monitors his mood with her mind on a nearly constant basis. She wants to offer _something_ to help heal him, and hopes her company is at least a very small poultice. From this experience, she is surprised to find that, despite everything, Ben is more _grounded_ than she had ever expected he would be. He constantly reassures Rey, also without speaking a single word, that the reason for his remarkable stability is her. His grief bends him like a gnarled tree, but the roots that hold him down are deep. The last obstacle remaining is only the bizarre fact that she has never truly met _this_ Ben Solo, until now. 

Even with all the strength and majesty of the dyad, Ben and Rey still move towards one another with the awkward caution of children. In many ways, they are still almost strangers. Though they have seen a kaleidoscope of futures in one another’s eyes, the truth of the matter is they have never spoken in true friendship before. The bond had always whispered to them in the night, when Kylo Ren had still devoted epochs of time to the hope that Rey would finally one day take his hand as his Sith bride. But Kylo Ren is dead now, and what has replaced him has been frozen for so long that the mystery of Ben Solo now seems bigger than anything else. Some days, Rey isn’t sure even Ben knows who Ben is anymore. Other days, she thinks he knows her better than anyone has ever known anyone in the history of time. 

When the weather is sunny, Ben sits on the shore and looks at the ocean, just like Rey had done when she had first arrived on Ahch-To. She knows he is thinking of his home world, Chandrila, and of the dreams he had pulled from Rey’s mind back on _The Supremacy_. Other times he takes his fill of walking the island, and she feels it when he sits down with the Thala-sirens, or hurls rocks off the clifftops, or squats down in the dirt to examine a particular plant. Ben likes to know how things are put together, and while he decompresses a lifetime of trauma, he somehow still manages to be curious about the island itself, and the complex ecosystems that pull it all together. 

Rey grows used to the sensation of small things appearing in her hand whenever she least expects. Ben passes her items of interest through the bond when they are apart, and she keeps them all in a line in the galley of the Falcon. They are always different; an insect’s colorful wing, a piece of spiral seashell. An unusual blossom from a flower that only grows where the air is thin. He doesn’t send them with words, but she usually doesn’t need to hear him to understand their sentiment. 

In the meantime, Rey builds her grain silo. She has always been invested in problems she can solve with her hands. After the silo goes up, she climbs up on the slanted rooftops of the stone village, and much to the chagrin of the Lanai she attempts to repair any holes she finds. Later, she builds a pen for livestock. She has spotted a race of wooly, yellow creatures with no discernable face on the cliffs by the shore, nearly the size of D-O, and thinks they might produce a reasonable textile if only she could pluck a few off the mountain. When she fails to catch one after several consecutive days of falling into the watery gorge between sheer rock faces, she gives up and breaks the pen down again. When she rebuilds later, her supplies take the form of a hutch. This time she easily fills it with Porgs, from which she harvests fresh eggs every morning. 

Chewbacca stays holed up inside the belly of the Falcon, doing his own decompressing, though Rey thinks he can’t say there forever. She knows he is only licking his wounds. Chewie had always been understanding of her fascination with Kylo Ren before, and after a few more glimpses inside Ben’s head, that picture has begun to slowly clarify. Uncles have their own ways of loving their nephews, and Rey isn’t sure even a death could sever that kind of bond. She often tries to talk with the Wookie at night when she returns to sleep in one of the Falcon’s tight, narrow bunks, because she has given Ben the run of Luke’s old hut. She can neither feel Ben’s resentment of this extra space, nor his desire for it, and thinks the subject is touchy enough that he has relegated it to one of the issues he just locks behind his emotional door. Things progress more slowly than she would like, but the world continues to move forward, despite everyone’s best efforts to halt them all exactly where they are. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  


Evening comes in orange and yellow hues as Rey dusts her hands off and surveys her work for the day. The village circle, once somber and barren, is now host to a variety of plant life Rey has relocated into trenches along the footpath. Several larger rocks had to be dug up and removed, a task made more difficult without Chewie’s assistance, until she finally relents and uses her Force powers. Rey finds she enjoys the simple, if tedious tasks associated with building up a homestead. She knows the Lanai disapprove of her choice in modifications, but Rey knows if she is to live here, then the village must be more than stone and old memories. It must function like a peopled village, with beasts and roasting pits and plants and voices. She wants it to be a home. 

Something hot streaks down her cheek and Rey stops up short, resting her makeshift trowel against a nearby wall. When she brings her dirty hand up to her face, she is surprised to find an errant tear, and at first she is confused. But then she reaches out for Ben, and sucks in a cold breath when she feels him. He is crying, somewhere down on the shore. But when she touches him again, her worry lessens. Rey feels Chewbacca’s fur as if on her own face, and knows right away what has happened. Ben and Chewie are making amends.

But then Rey feels Ben jerk away from her, as if from a hot iron, and their connection goes temporarily blank. She sits down hard, suddenly annoyed. She still isn’t sure how he can do that. His control over their bond is far superior to Rey’s, whose heart might as well be an open book. She only knows that he pulls away when he doesn’t want her to be burnt by some memory, or some ugly experience they have learned will hurt them both if they aren’t careful. For now, Ben needs to be alone. She thinks about this some more, and frowns with just a little hurt. Ben is _often_ alone. She supposes, he always has been. But she also knows very well from experience that _some_ habits, no matter how unwanted, are sometimes difficult to break. 

With their minds temporarily shuttered, Rey takes the opportunity to cast her thoughts back to the week after she returned from Exegol, when she had been sure of Ben’s death, and how close to death she herself had felt at that time. How quietly, modestly _gutted_ she had been. The smile she bore for her friends as they joyfully celebrated the end of the war had been one of the most painful of her life. She hadn’t wanted to share this aspect of herself with Ben since discovering how closely their minds were bridged now. It would be cruel to put her own suffering on top of his own, already too heavy for the spirit of anyone so young. But Rey finds her memories come to her easily now, when nothing is keeping her from thinking of them. It almost feels good to acknowledge it, like closure. She doesn’t need to guard anyone. At the moment, Ben is protecting himself. 

Rey gives a despondent sigh and dusts her hands of work for the day. She has done enough, she thinks. And anyway, the sun is going down. The village is already growing dark. Purple shadows drop beneath the stone facades, and stretch out in twiny fingers beneath the jumble of wide-brimmed leaves along the footpath. She hasn’t built a fire yet, and maybe it is already too dark to do such a thing without any further assistance. 

✶

Luke’s hut is darker inside than she expects, and Rey has to fumble to find the lamp on the far table. When she stokes it to life, the warm orange glow spreads out across the small room, and she sets it back down with a weighty thunk. Though it feels a little voyeuristic, she takes a moment to look around. This is Ben’s quarters now. And yet, after she has looked only for a few seconds, she realizes... it still _isn’t_. Not really. He’s barely left a mark. 

Everything is as Luke had left it. Rey’s eyebrows raise, markedly surprised. She had expected… Well, it was hard to say exactly what. Kylo Ren had seemed fastidious to the point of neuroticism, but Ben? Who knew what Ben would be. Something else? Not this. 

Rey makes a note that her _own_ possessions have been picked up and openly handled; a handsome wooden staff, a singing bowl, a handful of leather strips meant to help modify her belt. All touched, and set down again in slightly different places. But Luke’s things are apparently too sacred entirely. The pitcher is unmoved, and so is the grass blade, and the chair is just so. The parchment is still as it was too, though Rey can see Ben had dipped the tip of the quill into ink with the intent of scratching something out. Only a single black drop defiles the paper now, the only clue left behind to prove that Ben had once swallowed back some unexpressed sentiment, forever unwritten. 

A sharp pang of loneliness strikes Rey directly. That drop of ink seems indicative of something greater. It is a word unspoken. A thought swallowed back by one. She looks at it some more, then sits down heavily on the edge of the bed. She feels tired. And Rey supposes, as innocently as she is capable, that lying down for a little while couldn’t do anyone any harm. 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  
  


“ _Rey_ ,” Ben breathes her name, and it is a wet heat that rolls down her neck. His hands are large, and very warm. They tangle with hers, pushing her fingers back into the bed. His body is heavy on top of her. Are all men so heavy, Rey wonders? How novel. She feels nearly crushed by his weight, and yet it still seems like it’s not heavy _enough_ . Her stomach and chest are a tangle of desire. She wants more of this. She wants to be cut open, she thinks, so Ben can crawl inside of her. She wants for them to never be apart again. They have both been alone for so long. _Too long._ Long enough to leave a scar. She sighs, and rolls into that sweet heat, so much like her own.

“Rey.” Ben says again. This time, his tone is surprised. 

  
  


Rey blinks awake. 

Luke’s hut is darker than it was. The lamp has nearly died again, and slowly, she sits up one-handed on the bed. Her other hand goes to rub across her eyes, and she makes the sluggish realization that she must have been dreaming. It’s late. In all honesty, likely nearing dawn. She looks up, and her vision is still a little blurry with sleep. 

Ben is standing in the door frame. He is handsome, cloaked in blue shadow against a backdrop of prickling stars. At first it takes Rey a moment to catch the look on his face, but when she does, she’s stricken by it, and sits up a little straighter. Ben seems raw, chapped around the eyes with some thick emotion he very plainly has only just discarded, in favor of looking at her instead with a vague awe.

With nothing and nobody to be held accountable to, in recent weeks Ben’s beard has begun to creep in. Right now his hair is longer than she has ever seen it, and mussed in a way that only comes from threading through it with anxious hands. This is just one more piece of evidence that he had, until recently, been working over something hideous and private in his mind. In the late hours, Ben is often intense and self-reflective. He is certainly a far cry different from the immaculately groomed Sith prince Rey had first encountered in the woods, outside of Maz Kanata’s cantina. Ben Solo and Kylo Ren are as opposite as day and night. 

“What are you doing?” Ben’s voice is quiet, and deceptively innocent. But Rey can feel something darker, headier, rolling off of him. His heart is in his throat. He hadn’t expected to find her here. 

“I... wasn’t…” Rey mumbles, her own heart beginning to beat more quickly. She can practically _taste_ his interest, and one of her hands goes up to push her own hair back from her face. In her sleep, her buns had come undone. Had he glanced inside her dreaming mind? From the look on his face, it seemed impossible he hadn’t. “I just…” 

Rey stands up awkwardly. Both of them go very, very still. Finishing her sentence seems only to serve the purpose of making her look even more like a fool than she already feels, and Rey is not a fool. So she quickly gives up on any audible sentiment. She is here because _she wanted to be_. 

Even in the dark, she can see it when Ben’s tongue whets his lower lip, and his eyebrows draw together into a thinking frown. He takes a step towards her, then freezes, as if afraid she’ll run off if he approaches too fast. Briefly, Rey considers doing exactly that. But in the end she manages to keep still, and Ben takes another step. And then his hand raises up in an arc which might be even slower than everything else which had just preceded it. In the heat of the moment, this extreme, measured caution makes Rey feel like she might scream. But again she contains herself, though only barely. Ben gently slides the backs of his fingers up the front of Rey’s bare arm, still warm with sleep, and they both give an involuntary shudder. 

“The future is always in motion.” Ben breathes. His hand ghosts higher, and the pads of his fingers brush too delicately across the place where Rey’s collarbones lie hidden beneath her clothes. She feels his fear and worry mingle equally with his desire. _Desire_ . Ben acknowledges it directly, though he says nothing about it out loud. He is afraid to break her, she can _feel_ it, and not at all in the same sense as a lightsaber battle. 

“...I saw a family, Rey.” It almost costs him something to admit this. Rey is not sure why. “Did you... see them too?”

Of course she had seen them. It had been too overwhelming an experience to simply _forget_. She had seen beautiful children, with thick, dark hair and clear brown eyes. Exceptional love, and exceptional life, long and fulfilling. But she had also seen a throne of iron, and a life of pain and power. Exquisite control, bathed in blood. She had seen a castle near a silver city, and endless planets of sand, a sunny library filled with diligent students, and a horde of malicious devotees filling an arena of stone. She had seen more things than she could make sense of, the night they had touched for the very first time. 

Without thinking, Rey’s hand rises up and she grabs Ben’s fingers in her own. “I saw them.” 

She admits it with equal honesty. She isn’t a coward. By now, her heart is thundering in her chest, and she isn’t sure why her insides have begun to feel hollow and flighty as a bag of feathers, but she knows she _wants_ to do it when she pulls Ben’s palm up to her mouth and kisses it. He sucks in a breath, and his mouth tightens. They have both spent _so much time_ alone. Eons. Epochs. 

For a while Ben’s tongue just works behind his teeth, twisting his lips as he tries to say something. But in the end he can’t even manage a single word. _He’s holding back,_ Rey realizes with some surprise. _He thinks he’s not permitted._

_Is_ he? She wonders, her lips still grazing his skin. His hands are as callused as her own. _Permitted_ ? Flighty and fluttering, Rey swallows her heart back down again. She is no stranger to the mechanics of the bedroom. Jakku was not a place for innocents. Slaves were traded as readily as scrap, and on a nowhere planet near an outpost peopled with aliens half-corrupt and half-dead, viable options for breeding were few and far between. Until meeting this man, any thought of such a violation of her own person had only filled Rey with fury and revulsion. But things are different now. _Ben_ is different, and she is young, isn’t she? And _willing_ , the revelation reveals itself. So, why _not_ her? Why not?!

Ben’s sealed lips part as he sucks in another surprised breath, already inside her head. 

“Why not?” Rey demands, pushing towards him, and Ben’s hand raises to clasp the side of her neck. It feels half in defense, and half in supplication, and his fingers perceptibly tremble. His face is dark, but his eyes are inky with desire. 

“...I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore.” Is all he says. 

The sentiment is... sweet. But more so, it almost seems childlike in its reticence. It is more innocent than even Rey had expected from someone so battle-hardened, and she feels him feeling foolish for it. He doesn’t need to, she reassures. What more could there be to understand? Ben Solo has had _enough_ of killing. His worries have always been unintelligibly vast, and so Rey just saves him the trouble and kisses him instead. 

She knows she has moved correctly when Ben immediately sinks into her. His eyebrows knit together into a scowl, and she feels his fingers twitch even as his tongue slides past her teeth. Ben’s arms are stiff, and she can still _hear_ him waging a losing battle against himself as his desires surge up and begin to take over. Her instincts for this are good on their own, but with the active help of their force bond, every rake of her lips, every slide of her tongue is refracted pleasurably back at her though Ben’s mind, and before she even knows it, his hands have found her belt and he yanks her sharply closer. His kiss quickly grows bruising, his hot breath spilling across her face, and Rey’s arms circle the back of his neck to anchor them together. Ben’s mind is a shimmering red thread on a field of dark blue, taut near enough to snapping. 

Just now, something about the universe has settled into place. This is a shared notion. Though their hearts pound and their hands begin to explore with progressively more boldness, something is calm about this moment, too. There is a perfect uniformity in the way their mouths slot together. This is the world as it _should have_ been, _should be,_ will _continue_ to be. All the mysteries of the universe will unspiral here, in all the places where they touch. No challenge will ever be too large for the two of them to tackle together again, as long as they have this. Together they are a power found only once in an eon, stronger even than death itself. 

When she pulls back, Rey is pleased to feel Ben chases her. He seems half-drunk from the kiss, and he groans, half a grin stretching his wide mouth into a beautiful shape before he sinks down on her shoulder. A shiver runs down her spine when he noses along her neck, behind her jaw, and his tongue flicks beneath the lobe of her ear, liquid hot. Something heavy sinks low in her gut. Rey pauses on the white-hot needlepoint of the decision, and then her hands rise to hastily start stripping off the outer layer of her robes. 

Ben pulls back at this and goes stiff again. At first he only watches her as she shucks a shoulder free of her linen wrap, and then the other, before her fingers find her belt. The intention behind this is very clear, and Rey feels Ben’s eyes on her as hot as an ember from one of her bonfires. He is the same, beneath his skin. She can feel his _want_ pulsing without even touching him, she can _feel it_... But before she can undo any of her buckles he reaches out and halts her hands anyway. His hands are too strong, and damp with nerves. They just breathe for a weighty moment, too caught up in staring at one another to find any words for what is actually happening. 

Eventually, Ben finds his tongue again. “I wouldn’t be able to stop.” 

Despite how neutral he has kept his voice, Ben’s frankness is both mortifying and incredibly wanted. Rey’s face heats, and she slowly lowers her hands from her clothes, instead letting Ben gather her thin wrists inside his wide grip. He’s gentle again. This will never stop surprising Rey. She hadn’t pegged this person, in any of his incarnations, as being capable of _such tenderness._ At least, not until the moment she had seen him smile on Exegol, for the very first and last time.

Her own truth is just as bold. “...I don’t want you to stop.”

It burns, but she thinks it feels good for them to finally be totally honest about this unspoken thing. _Feeling_ it is certainly one acknowledgement, but saying it out loud somehow makes it more real. 

“...It’s late.” Ben eventually manages. He tries to stand up straighter, to regain some composure. Any composure. Though, this somehow only ends up with Rey pulled closer to his body again. He examines her face in the dark like he has never seen something so beautiful. Again, his mouth twists on a few difficult words. “... My uncle’s house... I... couldn’t…” 

“Oh..!” 

She sees it. Ben is very plain in some of his sentiments. He’s logical and sentimental in equal parts, and the blur of color and emotion inside his head is telling Rey that Luke is still too nearby. Even now, that relationship is an old hurt which hasn’t quite finished healing. This fated rendezvous will need to wait for another place, and another night. Blinking into the dark as she digests his thoughts, Rey nods, and shamelessly tugs her clothes back into place. 

Ben’s fingers touch Rey’s hairline, then push tentatively across her scalp. He really _is_ tender, underneath it all. She knows he feels a physical and a spiritual pain, because she does too, but it is maybe the sound of his voice that hurts the most. “Forgive me. Please.”

He says it like the apology is meant for a hundred other things she is already owed, all of which he still carries the weight of. Again, he is more child than man in these kinds of situations, because she can clearly sense how badly her approval is wanted. Rey sighs, and folds herself one more time into Ben’s arms to hug him close. She keeps the gesture chaste as she can, and pushes her forehead into his chest once more before separating at last. Time is something they have in spades. 

“...What is there to forgive?” Her smile is small and affectionate, and her shoulders ease when Ben lets out a little sigh of relief. The space between them seems colder than it did before, but Rey supposes she doesn’t mind. There will be other nights. She looks him up and down once, then steps out of the hut with a mind to return to the falcon. 

When Rey is halfway down the stone path, Ben calls out to her again, and she pivots to look at him. His hand is on the door, Luke’s cloak black in the shadows, making him look very sage in the dark. “...I promise, I will. I _want to._ ” 

Rey hopes the flush creeping up her neck isn’t visible in the shadows, though she knows there is nothing she can do from Ben tasting the pulse of desire and excitement that must have shot through their bond. He bends his head a little, his face obscured by the curtain of his black hair, before he stands up straight again and Rey can see that he is grinning. It’s a marvelous look. It pulls at his wide mouth and flashes his teeth. Almost sweet. 

In her mouth, Rey’s tongue grows heavy, and she spins on an agitated shoe and starts off again towards the beach. “Best not tell Chewie you said that, he’ll have your arm off this time for sure!” 

When Rey sinks into her bunk on the Falcon some time later, the ship is quiet. She has beaten the dawn, but soon enough the deck’s circuitry will come to life in a noisy acknowledgement of the beginning of another daily cycle. Chewbacca will clamor around in the galley until Rey rises to question him about his conversation with Ben, and Chewie will tell her, because she knows that he will want to. D-O will inconspicuously reorganize tools and bolts to the point of frustrating everyone, and they will discover a handful of Porg nests in hatches they thought they had already cleaned out. Rey will run her morning drills, and then she’ll look to her chores for the day. 

But more than anything, when Rey wakes up tomorrow, she knows that Ben will be there. Tomorrow will be another chance at another day. And after that, they will have another day. And then, another one. And another after that, and another. Stretching forward in time. 

  
  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys! Is anybody still reading this? Here's just a short chapter I had sitting around for forever, I got too burnt by what happened to Ben and I lost my taste for writing on this for a while, then Covid happened, but if people still want it I'll pick it back up! It should only be about two more chapters and it's pretty clearly outlined. Anyway, give a shout in the comments if you give a shit! And if not, enjoy some broody moody Byronic ben solo and just like, live your life. I support it! These young adults are horny and awkward! Here we go.

There are thick stratocumulus clouds out over the open ocean, broken apart intermittently by windows of sky blue. Ben likes watching the landscape in the mornings. It is one small privilege he has allowed himself now that he is back in his old skin. This morning, the clouds roll low over the island, and they feel closer than ever to the top of his head from where he is perched up on the lip of a cliff, nearby to the old Jedi temple. 

Ben used to like watching the Silver Sea back on Chandrila on beautiful days, but he thinks the child who had sat on that green hill and the man who sits on the cliff are more different now than they are the same. He takes in how the clouds dapple the landscape, dropping lackadaisical blue shadows down over the uneven terrain. Wind buffets his face and his hair catches in his collar, but in Luke’s old robes he doesn’t feel the chill. Ben thinks outer space is several hundred thousand times colder than here. He knows  _ exactly _ what cold is. For all his own personal inner demons, machinations, and furies, this is a peaceful planet. 

There is a chirrup in the nearby grass and Ben glances down to spot one of the innocuous brown and white birds Rey has taken to keeping in a hutch. It is returning to a nest he hadn’t seen before, perched against a rock near to the sheer cliff drop. Two of the four eggs are cracked and empty, and one is unhatched. One living chick remains, still gummy and fragile with the unspoken potential for a violent fate. Ben hasn’t been this close to innocent animals in many years, not until Rey had brought him out of purgatory and onto Ahch-To, and so he still feels a little strange when the creatures don’t fear him. When he reaches out to pick up the remaining unhatched egg, the mother bird only regards him with interest. There are no natural predators on this island to teach her otherwise. Even now, Ben is _still_ _too_ _used_ to the fear. 

He spreads his hand wide and rests the small egg in the palm of his hand. It is warm, and weighs barely anything, and so he is not sure if he thinks this makes it distinctly frightening or distinctly beautiful. Ben is also still too used to metal surfaces. Inorganic structures, the cold logic of droids, patterns of efficiency, and habits of thought-control meant to reinforce violent ideologies many times bigger than himself. The shell bobs in his palm with the wind, and for a moment, Ben wonders if it wouldn’t be kinder to just crush it. Crush it before it has the chance to bounce over the ledge of the cliff and vanish forever into the roaring waters below. But just as he is about to close his fist around the poor thing, laughter echoes up the side of the mountain and Ben looks up.

_ Rey _ . 

For the first few seconds, Ben blinks and looks around, before he realizes Rey is not on the cliff at all. She is still down on the beach by the Millennium Falcon, which is her usual habit in the mornings. She is running drills, like Ben used to do when he had still been Kylo Ren, in the dark training hulls of the First Order ships that had smelled like sweat and metal and blood. He had only  _ felt _ her laugh, perhaps at something Chewbacca had said, and the thrill of it had flickered across their link. 

Looking over his knees, Ben’s feet dangle freely above a jagged drop down into sharp boulders, and the unsplash of an inlet of the churning sea. He thinks that Rey’s laughter is a beautiful sound. He is not sure he has heard it until this moment. Ben has  _ felt _ a range of her other positive emotions... He has felt her exaltation. Her appreciation. Her joy. Relief...  _ And _ , his ears burn as his fingers slowly curl around the egg in a protective cage, he has felt her lust. All are precious. But he has not yet heard her simple laugh. It seems like an easy thing. A throwaway sentiment of emotional stability that Ben is not sure he himself is personally capable of yet. From glimpses into her mind, Ben gets the notion that Rey smiles easily with her friends, and that laughter is a recent companion she has learned to feel honestly. But with Ben, her expressions continue to remain a little guarded. Something holds its breath behind her eyes.

It’s no small wonder Rey is still unable to completely relax in Ben’s presence, considering everything he has said and done. The miracle of the dyad is truly the biggest mystery of Ben’s new life now, even though he knows she loves him. Her devotion is complete, she has made this abundantly clear through the bond, and his feelings for her are…complexly, exactly, the same. Before Rey, Ben had only been half a person. Without Rey, Ben would not exist. Jealousy and loneliness had forged his path as Kylo Ren, who had only known how to covet her. But Kylo Ren is dead now.  _ Kylo Ren is dead,  _ he thinks this again and again with variations of conviction. Ben  _ knows _ that Rey loves him. Even further, he knows that she is  _ in love with _ him, like he is with her. Their minds are a mirror in the Force, each reassuring the other of their collective completeness. He knows he would rather die over and over again than ever be apart from Rey. But he still wonders some days if she really even  _ likes _ him. Ben is still not even sure if  _ Ben _ likes Ben. 

Slowly, he forces himself to uncurl his fingers from around the egg. It is still whole and safe, in the warm palm of his hand. He takes an uneven breath, and listens with half a hopeful feeling for another trill of Rey’s laughter. Everything still feels so fresh.

For Ben, everything comes raw these days; his emotions towards Rey are more frightening than ever. But everything is somehow  _ old _ and  _ familiar _ with her too. The first time he saw her, he knew immediately that he had seen her somewhere else before. Someplace he remembered, from a life he hadn’t yet lived. Once upon a time he had seen her in black and red, a vision of power and destruction to match his own.  _ But _ , he reminds himself again and again, with progressively more and more intense lines of reasoning,  _ Kylo Ren is dead now _ , and Ben is free to look closer at all the other memories of future Rey he has seen and desired. Better futures, where his hands are cleaner.  _ Kylo Ren is dead _ , he tells himself again.  _ He is dead. He is _ dead.

Rey caresses the back of Ben’s mind at exactly the right moment. She can tell he’s thinking of her. His guard is never quite as consistent when he dwells on Rey too long. Her mental touch feels like her fingers are sliding up the back of his scalp, and Ben shivers, goosebumps prickling down his arms. After a breath to calm himself, he leans over and replaces the unbroken egg in the nest, and he finally stands up. 

The wind buffets around Ben’s borrowed brown robes as he settles his foot on the cliff rocks and looks out over the distant shoreline. Below, he can barely see the tiny glint off the hull of the faraway Falcon. Keeping a respectable distance from Rey is getting harder, and Ben wonders, not for the first time, whose benefit any of his efforts are actually meant for.

  
  
  


✶

  
  


There is an efficiency to the way Rey moves. She is not a graceful person physically, but her economy of motion is something Ben very much admires. She moves with the surety and confidence of a fighter. For a while, he watches her run the end of her morning routine, her yellow lightsaber echoing Luke’s familiar choreography in a committed grip. It turns out this island is a whole new world of dichotomies for Ben in more than a few ways; he appreciates Rey’s form, and yet he still resents seeing her perform the old routines he had also been forced to run under Luke’s tutelage. Repetition is key, Luke had always insisted. Muscle memory will lead you forward when fear slicks your mind blank. But Ben had seldom felt this was good advice. He had been arrogant in his own talent in his younger days, and had never openly acknowledged his fear even existed. Now, he is anything but arrogant. His new life is full of dualities. Black and white. This and that. Is and isn’t. Confident and afraid. 

Close and far. 

Ben thinks that he wants to be close. Closer to his old self. Closer to Rey. And he  _ is _ . But he’s far, too. 

She hasn’t stopped practicing, even though his presence must be obvious, and Ben takes the time to assess her form. 

Rey’s hands are beautiful. He thinks this specifically because they’re very calloused. He looks at them as she moves, keeping his eyes locked on her figure as he slowly walks around the Falcon’s landing gear. Those hands are just like his own. He not so secretly enjoys this fact. He thinks he has always admired her hands, especially when he had been Kylo Ren. They have a certain coarseness that makes his breath come quicker, but they still hold the capacity to touch with care. 

Like her hands, all of Rey has been hardened by the labor of her efforts. Her arms show the curve of muscle, and though her figure is slight, nobody knows better than Ben the raw power behind one of her deadlier, better-planned swings. Her calves are strong as iron, and her shoes scrape with conviction across the pebbly shore as she runs her drills, her body moving in a perfect harmony of well-rehearsed choreography, against a backdrop of sparkling blue water. 

Though he knows he is being rude, Ben senses Rey noticing his open staring. He  _ feels _ her little trill at his presence, but discipline still dictates she complete her repetition first. And so it is only after Rey has run through one final arc and sidestep with her blade that she finally stops up short, then retracts the lightsaber to look over at him. Ben appreciates her commitment, and the directness of her gaze. 

Sweat glistens on Rey’s forehead, and on the triangular patch of her chest not covered by white linen. Ben glances at this specific shape, before forcing his mind to stop itself there. He shouldn’t wander down that path without her permission, and most especially not when she can hear him. He’s standing in the shadow of the hull of the Falcon, and when he looks up at Rey’s face again, a patch of sunshine has slid over her, making her hair shine gold. She smiles at him, a little breathless. Even now, they’re still a bit strange with one another. Words are difficult to find sometimes. 

Ben glances down again, where Rey grips her weapon. He has seen her wield the yellow lightsaber before, but they have never spoken of it. Even after she retracted the blade, its energy still hangs in the air like a static. Ben feels it tingling lightly on his skin. Even this much evidence of the Jedi legacy that Ben has left behind puts him a little on edge, and he can feel his own reticence feeding over to Rey. Her smile fades a little. She knows he has retreated nearly completely from using the Force. At least, for the time being. For now, Ben only tries to  _ feel _ , and he almost never  _ uses _ . 

“...You built it yourself.” He says plainly, still looking at the blade. Some things they don’t need to tell each other. Rey nods. 

“I did.”

He finds he’s genuinely curious. “How did you do it?” 

Ben’s own saber had been monstrous; an unstable thing, shocked through with tremors of violent energy he found the hilt could barely contain. Exhaust port cross guards were the only modification he could manage to keep the blade from bursting in his hand. Hurling it into the sea on Endor’s ocean moon had been the wisest decision ever to come from the savage act of its creation. 

“Well, I suppose... I…?” 

Rey’s eyes seek back for a memory. He sees her in his mind, sitting under a canvas tent at a Resistance tech bench, littered with broken parts. Next to her is a stack of ancient tomes made out of genuine paper.  _ Jedi _ texts, Ben notes with a twitch of interest. 

“...I suppose I just, read a  _ book _ .” 

Ben blinks. Was that... sarcasm? His thoughts shift hue, going from purple to something a little lighter. His amusement is a surprise even to himself. He has _never_ been a smiler, not even as a child, and humor still sits uneasy with him. But Rey feels his mind brighten all the same, and finally deems it safe to creep a little closer. She stops up short just under the shadow of the Falcon, and holds the hilt of her lightsaber out for Ben to take. It feels familiar. Why does it feel _so_ _familiar_? 

_ Take it,  _ Rey says. Her thoughts are words more often than Ben’s are. He can hear her voice in his head as clearly as words from her mouth, but they are always reflected on the underside by whatever Rey is feeling. This particular reflection is trust, and reassurance, and gentle confidence. At first, Ben is reticent, but then he reaches out and takes the hilt in his hands anyway. 

The grip is strange, smaller and narrower than what would be appropriate for Ben’s much larger hands. But he thinks he has seen such a thing on a bo staff before. He knows Rey favors the staff. Part of the hilt at the base is wrapped in thonged leather, and when he finally switches the blade on, a shock tremors down his arm. Ben makes an audible exhalation as he steps back, holding the lightsaber aloft between them. Yellow light pools up beneath Rey’s face as she gives him a hesitant smile. 

“ _ Grandfather _ !” he half-swallows the word, leaving a choked sound behind. This is why the blade had seemed so familiar. Inside it still lives a piece of the legacy blade. At first Ben only handles it with admiration, his face going slack with wonder as he moves it fluidly through the air. It  _ hummmmmms  _ with contentment in his grip, touching him on the inside. It exists in perfect harmony with his own energy, and his breath grows tight in his chest. “It feels like it belongs to me.” 

Rey doesn’t say anything, although her eyes dart over his figure as he admires her handiwork. Suddenly, Ben realizes his own rudeness and he stops up short. His whole body stiffens, and he immediately retracts the blade and hands it back. “...Which means it belongs to you.” 

She takes the blade gently and clips it back to her belt, then crinkles her nose up and smiles at him. Her teeth are straight and white, and the bridge of her nose is dotted with sun-freckles. She’s brown and beautiful as any sea bird. “Your hair’s got quite long, hasn’t it?”

The frankness of her change in topic is disarming. Ben blinks some more, and doesn’t say anything. Then, in a slightly lighter tone, “...Has it?” (He already knows that it has.) 

“Yes, I think so.” She leans in a little closer, like she has a secret. But she only teases him in a hushed voice, “You’re a bit of a vagabond now.” 

The corner of Ben’s mouth twitches. It is  _ still _ strange to feel Rey’s affection, simple and clean, and without any demand that he be or do anything in return. For so long, she had only looked at him with scorn. Now, everything is so different. He can still feel that tiny coil of nerves behind her eyes, but he wonders if she isn’t more afraid he won’t understand her intentions. Ben doesn’t think Rey is much more experienced in these matters than he is, but all the same, even when their thoughts are known to one another, they will inevitably still find ways to miscommunicate. Ben wonders if Rey has followed him down this particularly vulnerable spiral of thinking, but if she has, she has the decency not to say anything about it. Instead, he just tries to meet her in the middle. A nervous hand runs through his too-long hair, and the twitch at his mouth pulls into a half-grin. 

“...Was Luke like a vagabond when you found him here too?” 

  
  


“No!” Rey rejects this thought outright, indignant. But then she pauses, “...Well, yes. A bit.” 

“So I look like my uncle?”

“In his clothes, yes, but it’s a bit more than that? A bit funnier? More like an oracle. Or, I suppose, a wizard?”

Ben  _ almost _ laughs. But, he still doesn’t. “...A wizard.” he repeats. 

“Yes, that’s right. A space wizard.” 

“A space wizard?”

“Yes.” 

The joke is obvious enough, even for Ben. “You mean like a Jedi.” 

  
  


Rey’s grin widens at first, then slowly dims. 

_ Like a Jedi. _ Her silent agreement is much more serious when it passes between them. Ben thinks he doesn’t like this at all. In fact, he feels very much like he might hate it. His eyes snap down to the ground, his briefly lived flicker of amusement quickly passing. He hears Rey give a very small sigh. 

Ben does not want to be a Jedi. Ben isn’t sure he wants to be  _ anything _ anymore, except to be here. They share the silence, and he can feel Rey’s frustration. Not with him specifically, but maybe instead with the universe at large. Flirtation over, apparently. 

“You  _ do _ look like a Jedi, you know. That’s what you are.” Rey’s insisting voice is only half sincere. She knows he will push back despite her desire to see him pick up the mantle. Instead, she pushes him a little further, “...Shall we build you a new lightsaber? Together? Let me help you.” 

Ben shakes his head.

“And why not?” 

“Because I  _ shouldn’t _ be a Jedi. I’ll say it as many times as it takes.” 

“Then what  _ should _ you be?” It seems impossible she can’t grasp this. Ben’s eyes skate the ground, but he touches her thoughts very directly, and then he knows it isn’t that she can’t grasp it, she only doesn’t like it. 

He feels her come into his mind, and he leads her without asking. She follows him into the memory, and for an exquisitely painful moment they both stand on a rocky ledge overlooking the ocean of Kef Bir, on Endor’s watery moon. The mighty ruins of the Death Star are a savage, broken landscape far out to sea as Ben hurls his lightsaber into the hungry maw of the choppy waters. Rey follows the arc of it with sad eyes. He knows she is with him now, but Ben wishes more that she had been with him then, too. 

Ben does not think he will ever forget the sensation of Rey’s life force crackling through his physical body, healing nearly everything it touched. She had been there to witness the rise of Ben Solo, to see him pick up the mantle of his uncle and face their mutual enemy like a true Jedi of the knights of old. But now? Ben is not so sure he could sustain that life. He has done too much grievous damage to too many people to be permitted to live the hallowed life of a Jedi. And even now, he still thinks they were far too sanctimonious a bunch. He has too much contempt for their kind, even in the same breath believing the honor is outside of his reach.  _ Kylo Ren is dead _ , he vehemently thinks to himself again, more pained than ever, and silently, he feels Rey agree with him. 

_ You’re right. Kylo Ren  _ is _ dead. _

“I don’t know what to be, now.” His voice is barely audible. “Something else.” 

  
  


“Well then.” Rey sighs. They are free of the memory and just under the Falcon again, alone as they always are. Her hands park on her hips and she looks serious as a thunderstorm for a long moment. Then she asks in a dark tone, “Can you farm?” 

Ben frowns at her. An awkward silence stretches out, then he slowly shakes his head. He has only ever been filthy with the mud of a battlefield. Coaxing things steadily and gently to life is a tedious labor he knows nothing about, other than the night he had laid his hand on Rey’s corpse and given his life for hers. 

“Then can you scavenge?” 

Again, he looks almost mystified. “For what? Eggs?” There’s nothing on Ahch-To other than birds. And old rocks. And the perpetually furious fish people who seem to hate them both with a deep-seated vengeance. 

“Then I suppose there’s not much else for it. If you can’t survive on your own, you’ll just have to die again.” 

It takes an even longer moment for Ben to realize Rey is  _ still _ teasing him. His open confusion pulls another grin across her face, and when he finally hones in on the joke she laughs out loud. 

The sound is beautiful, just like he remembers it from the cliff. His jaw goes slack, even as he feels Rey’s mind crackle with amusement. 

A  _ real _ laugh. Ben’s stomach turns, warm and uncomfortable at once. _ Rey’s laugh _ . 

Pantomiming surprise, Rey suddenly jerks up a hand to cover her gasping teeth. “Oh! Oh, I’ve just thought of something! Something you could  _ definitely _ do! D’you know what we’ve got?” 

Ben arches an eyebrow at her, then folds his arms stiffly across his chest. He is not sure he enjoys being teased yet. He won’t dignify this joke with a reply. 

“Any guesses?”

When he continues to say nothing, Rey extends her arms towards the entrance to the Millenium Falcon. They hang in the air for a beat, and then she swings them around to gesture at Ben himself. When nothing happens, she finally sighs and drops her arms back down. Ben is absolutely  _ no good  _ at this, and they both know it. But the difference is, apparently, Rey finds this fact at least a little bit funny. Or, is it charming to her? Or is she _ infantilizing him _ ?? Ben squints at her as he tries to grasp her emotions. He fails, somewhat spectacularly. 

“A ship and a pilot! We have a  _ ship a _ nd a  _ pilot _ .” 

“ _ That _ ship?” Ben sputters. Though she is joking, he is still a little incredulous. But she isn’t exactly off base either. If there is anything Ben is still sure of, it’s his flying skills. “You want me to help pilot that disgusting hunk of garbage?” 

“Not just  _ a _ pilot.” Rey’s grin is a growing promise of an adventure not yet lived. “... _ The _ pilot. I’ve got an idea.” 

  
  
  


✶

  
  
  
  


Some things never change. Ben still  _ despises _ the Millennium Falcon. 

He has never stopped wishing it would fly directly into a supernova and disintegrate on a molecular level. Though Kylo Ren is dead and gone, ( _ he’s dead, he is DEAD now, _ ) some old wounds will never truly heal. The night he had mended bridges with Chewbacca and come aboard the ship for the first time, Ben was convinced he would be sick. Everything about the Falcon still stinks of Han Solo, and the injury of Ben’s negligent upbringing is only compounded by a patricidal guilt he feels he will never, ever truly be free from.  _ There _ is the table where he quietly drew while his parents argued, and  _ there _ is the bunk he put himself to bed in.  _ Down there _ are the smuggling holes he had crept through and explored unnoticed for hours on end, and of course  _ there _ is the cockpit, more important several times over to his father than anything else in his life. The seat of power gives Ben tremors even now, and his eye still twitches every time he lays a stiff hand on Han’s chair. Tonight is no different than any other night on the Falcon, except now Ben silently contemplates the possibility that  _ he _ one day might finally sit in the captain’s seat himself. It is, for all intents and purposes, a deeply destabilizing thought. 

Chewbacca has set a table of foraged fruit and steamed fish down for them all to share, and Ben picks up a fluorescent berry and slowly pushes it into his mouth. Rey sits next to him, quickly pushing an alarming portion of food down her own gullet. Her eating habits reveal her old lifestyle; she will forever be a stray, no matter where she goes or what her name is. Nothing about her is ladylike, or even a little bit self-conscious, and Ben thinks he loves her all the more for this. Her  _ easiness _ makes his  _ unease _ a little less difficult to bear. Ben temporarily loses himself in the sight of her downturned lashes until his quiet admiration is abruptly cut short when Chewie pointedly shoves himself down into the seat between them. Rey looks up with her mouth packed full of food and an expression of surprise. 

Since joining Rey and Chewie for meals, Ben has learned that nighttime is when she and the Wookie like to argue. Chewie rarely addresses Ben directly, but his presence has been accepted nonetheless. Ben still recalls a long ago uncle who had been infinitely patient with a sad little boy when he had required it, and he is relieved to the point of tears that even one small iota of that love might have been returned to him, however unexpected. Though Chewbacca is still frosty towards him, Ben supposes even this variety of forgiveness is much more than he deserves. Listening to this odd, familial nighttime conversation, he has also begun to understand that most of what they discuss is half about Ben anyway, even if he isn’t addressed directly. There is only one point of contention; Ben knows Rey has heard of Chewie’s blood debt to the Skywalker family, but he is not entirely sure she fully yet understands what that means. 

  
  


“No, I’m  _ not _ lying, I  _ do _ want to leave the planet!” Rey insists through her mouthful, and Chewie makes a joyful howl. “ _ Stop _ it, not forever! I’ve just built up the garden! I just think we have to, err, well, I suppose there’s-?” She glances at Ben, and he feels her retract her thoughts back from him, wanting to keep the secret. He can’t help but be amused as much as he’s also disappointed. He is finding more and more that Rey is a very quick study. “We have an errand to run.” 

Ben watches as Chewbacca’s line of inquiry grows so insistent and intense that it makes the little cone-shaped droid whizz off in a series of excited laps around the room. Rey grunts, and reaches her fingers into the fruit bowl. “Well  _ you’re _ the one who said you didn’t want to stay here! Let him go, if we’re together it’ll be alright. You don’t  _ have to _ come, you know!”

“Yes he does.” 

Rey and Chewbacca both pause to look at Ben, who is almost always silent in the evenings. Now, he just clamps his teeth shut. Eventually Chewie agrees with this sentiment, though very reluctantly, and they lock eyes in a frosty glare. Rey jostles Chewbacca hard in the arm, enough that it breaks him away first. 

“I released you from that debt.” She grits through a mouth full of fruit, “Remember?” 

“It’s not your decision.” Ben sighs. He feels sick again, like he had the night he had walked into the Falcon’s cockpit for the first time. He doesn’t want this, like he doesn’t want his father’s ship. “His debt transfers to the last living Skywalker.” 

“But I-?” Rey’s confusion is a jumble of sharp objects, before Ben finally feels her understand. She looks up at him with much more clarity than before, her shoulders even rising up a bit straighter, and Ben wonders at the sudden spike of sadness she feels. “...Oh.” 

The three of them stare at each other in a brutal silence. When they are finally saved, it comes as a clunk in the corner of the room, followed by a crash. Ben looks over, and sees that the loose little droid has fallen accidentally into an uncovered cargo hole. Chewbacca gives a heavy sigh, then hefts himself up from the table. When he returns, he is gripping the neck of a shimmering green bottle, then sets three small glasses down in front of them. 

“Don’t come.” Ben says in all seriousness as the Wookie pours out three drinks. He doesn’t know what Rey is planning, but he won’t be any man’s master anymore. “My father’s deeds aren’t mine.” 

Chewbacca only gives a grunt, and shoves Ben hard enough in his seat to make him wobble. Giving him an indignant look, Ben watches as Chewie shoots his glass back all at once, slams it on the table, then ambles angrily off down the hall. The aroma that hangs in the air after him is sharp and acrid. When Ben lifts the bottle to his nose to inhale, he flinches.  _ Membrosia _ . Very strong stuff. 

Rey gives her own glass an experimental sip, but the taste makes her nose scrunch up in disgust and she quickly sets it back down again. 

Ben looks at her curiously. “Where are we going?”

  
  


This is not the first time he has posed this line of inquiry, but Rey stays stubborn and works to keep it to herself. She sits back on the bench and gives him a long look, like she is trying to see under his skin. Ben can never help shivering in these moments. Her undivided attention is something he has coveted for so long that now that he has it, he never knows what to do with it. He looks back at her as steadily as he can, and tries not to broadcast his nerves. 

“...There’s something still broken.” She eventually says. “We’ve got a bit more mending to do, I think. You and I.”

Her thoughts are heavy on the  _ ‘we’ _ element of this statement, and Ben tilts his head a little as he stares at her harder. They both individually have a lot in front of them to work on, but as a unit? It’s not often they speak with words about what has happened between them, and Ben finds he’s thirsty for that conversation. “Tell me. I’ll go wherever you want to go.” 

This seems like a dangerous bravery, because Ben does not actually want to leave Ahch-To at all, but for Rey, he would be willing to do anything. Her face falls a little, and she still holds on to the secret. She leans on the table and looks down, and after a moment of serious contemplation, she also throws back the contents of her glass. When she has taken the shot, she slams it on the table again with a hack of disgust, and her face screws up as she shakes off the burn. Ben grimaces when he feels his own esophagus tingle too. His nose heats with fumes through their bond, and he reaches over to take a sip of water. 

“I came to Ahch-To to die.” The first part of her explanation is bleak, and she doesn’t pull her punches. Again, Ben admires her shamelessness. Rey is everything he isn’t, honor free from ego. “I wasn’t very… I didn’t think I’d… find...  _ you _ ?” She sits back and gestures at him, her cheeks flushing red with the Membrosia. “If we’ve got this life in front of us..? Well, I suppose the plan’s got to change now, hasn’t it?  _ We _ can’t... just...” she searches for words, and Ben feels her struggle. He finishes her sentiment for her. 

“...stay frozen.”

She nods. “We mustn’t stay frozen. One of us, yes. But both of us?” Her smile is a little sad underneath. 

  
  


Ben thinks he remembers an icy cave, back from when Rey had pulled him through the mirror door. He touches her mind, and sees it more clearly this time. Rey fears isolation. Her fear is a perfect reflection of his own. And yet, she really had come here to die. Not to kill herself, but to live out the long, measured life of a guardian, before passing away into obscurity at the edge of the universe, exactly like Luke had. This idea twists Ben’s mouth with anger, both at his former master and at himself. If only he had been able to find his way back sooner! Grief for them both pools inside his heart like a black liquid, and his head leans forward heavy on his neck. “...Tell me where to go.” He almost begs. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do.” 

She doesn’t answer. But she does touch him. 

Rey’s touch is still always an electric thing. Her fingers are warm when they slide down the side of his jaw to where his old scar had been, before she had healed the angry seam. Ben lets the touch angle his face towards her, and he steadies his gaze on the way the wisps of her hair curl by her ears. On the way her nose has browned from the sun. On the way her eyes are liquid dark, but also somehow still lit bright with intelligence and affection. He thinks she’s about to offer him some kind of consolation, but instead he kisses her before she can get to it. 

They are both surprised by this. Ben most of all. But then only sensations are important after that, simple and pure enough to understand. His lips part to brush against Rey’s, testing her. Their last kiss had been passionate and bruising, less a kiss and more a desperate seeking out for the missing other. This time, Ben is more cautious. He is always afraid of hurting, either others or himself, now that he is finally Ben Solo again. A careful hand raises to grasp Rey’s jaw, which is small enough to fit almost perfectly in his grip. He knows she isn’t nearly as crushable as she seems, but he doesn’t want to test the theory. He is not sure his hands have ever held something so precious. 

Rey sighs against his lips, and her breath is still sharp with alien spirits. When their tongues meet, Ben can taste the Membrosia. His hand slides lower to her neck, and he finally lets himself wrap an arm behind her on the bench, pulling her closer. 

The heat between them is always there. Ben hasn’t forgotten the glimpse he’d caught of Rey’s dreaming mind. He hasn’t forgotten his promise to her either. He has dwelled on it with a hitherto insane level of interest, and he feels his body recalling that sensation again now, with Rey warm in his arms. The problem is only that he has never touched a woman before. The Jedi Order had always counseled against emotional attachments, and Snoke had enforced celibacy on his top leadership in order to keep them cruel. Ben has never been alone in his own mind. Not truly. Especially with the First order, almost no time had ever been afforded for him to think on such matters, other than to recognize them in more oblique ways. In anger. Violence. Hatred. He is still a little afraid that with Rey, he will be too clumsy, or too rough to be of any use. But their bond is a gift again in the sense that it lets him measure his own progress as he goes, and so when Rey pulls his hand off her back and pushes it up her thigh, he can _feel_ _exactly_ how much his touch is welcome. He breaks away from the kiss before he lets this notion overwhelm him. 

“...This is where we eat.” He mumbles stupidly. Rey grins and huffs, and Ben can feel it hot on his face. 

“I don’t care.” 

She really  _ doesn’t _ . Ben is both a little frightened by and intrigued with Rey’s forwardness, and his fingers tighten on her thigh, then push up a little higher. His thumb slides up the inseam of her leg, where he can feel beneath the cloth that her skin is hotter. He wants to touch her more. Many times over. 

Rey shivers. He _feels_ it, like it’s one of his own. Ben sucks his teeth, his mouth silently working through the sensation. She likes this. She _likes_ _him_. She wants him. They want each other.

“Is this far away enough from Luke yet?” Rey wonders aloud, her mouth half twisted up in the corner. She’s teasing again, but there’s no need. Ben would do anything for her right now. 

“I  _ hate _ this ship.” Ben grunts, and Rey laughs again. It is the most beautiful sound in the world, Ben thinks, until he pushes his hand higher, and then he hears a sound that’s even better. Every single hair on the back of his neck prickles up when Rey gives a breathy gasp. 

“There - is - NO EXIT!” The lost droid suddenly announces from the cargo hold, and Ben physically jumps and abruptly sits back. Even Rey takes a hasty moment to touch her clothes in an unusual show of self-consciousness, and her eyes dart down the hall, and then back out towards the bunks again where Chewie has doubtlessly returned to sleep. She recalculates the risk factors with a twitch of disappointment, but Ben will remember the heat from between her legs on his hand for the rest of his life. Rey gives Ben’s cheek another brief caress, and then she scoots out from behind the table and goes to retrieve the fallen droid. 

  
  



End file.
